Rax/Maz/Jimbo 2020 Games Thread: "S.T.A.R.S...."

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Re: Rax/Maz/Jimbo 2020 Games Thread: "S.T.A.R.S...."

Post by Raxivace »

Eva Yojimbo wrote:Well, yesterday made me feel pretty dumb. Wasted some time going back to Demon Ruins to farm the Demon's Greataxe and Demon's Machete only to find I already had the former in my inventory. Luckily, I didn't waste too much time as I'm always carrying 10 souls around and put on the Helm of Avarice to (between both) quadruple item discovery, so I only had to take down like 3 Taurus Demons. Then I realized that I hadn't picked up the Giant Ember in New Londo Ruins, so I had to go back there and get that, and, frankly, all online maps suck if you're trying to find a specific item at a specific location. I'm sure it's hard given the convoluted nature of the level designs, but it still took a while to get my bearings and find it. So finally got the DGA upgraded to +15 and with my now 50 strength I'm doing like 650 damage one-handed and with Havel's shield in the other hand I was even able to successfully block Kalameet's attacks. Speaking of...
Yeah I had that problem with the maps when I first played the game, but now I know them well enough that I usually enough don't have a problem getting someplace specific, even if I have to occasionally Google a specific item whenever I replay it.

Yeah I've had the same issue with the Embers lol.
Kalameet may be my favorite boss in the game so far. Took me even more tries to beat that Artorias, but what an awesome fight with a badass boss. Not being able to dodge anything, managing stamina was even trickier than with Artorias and that breath attack was just devastating. After a couple of tries I eventually had to forego the hope of beating him with the ring that gives you extra souls and went with the Corianthy(sp?) ring that speeds up stamina regen. Still took me several tries after that. Funnily enough, on the time I beat him it I was going there mostly just to retrieve my souls/humanity and then book it back closer to the ladder so I didn't have to run so far every time just to retrieve them, but he kept knocking me down before I could get back to the ladder so I ended up fighting him anyway and got lucky to end up on his side a few times when he did that sweeping breath thing and I 2-handed the shit out of him.
He's a really cool fight. I really struggled again him on my Level 1 run, even with several White Phantoms helping me. What a tough son of a bitch.
Eva Yojimbo wrote:I don't think there's really much of any "storytelling" per se in DS. It's more what I'd call "lore" or world-building. Maybe it's my getting into D&D that's made me appreciate this aspect more (thinking about poor DMs having to invent an entirely new place with multiple locations and histories and politics and people etc.). I also think there's something about the perpetually melancholic and oppressive atmosphere that really hammers home the idea that something bad has happened to this place, and the "myst-ery" aspect of being dropped in a place and not really given much of anything explicit about its history or present. I may go into this more whenever I finish and write my review.
I mean, I like the melancholic atmosphere itself a lot, but I dunno. Lore/world-building on its own doesn't mean much to me if I'm not already invested in the basic narrative.

Like people have written a lot about the backstories of Ornstein and Smough for example, but man they're still just some dudes that I have to kill to me.
Pretty awesome. Kinda makes me wish I'd invested in Pyromancy more! LOL.
The problem with Pyromancy is that your own stats doesn't effect the amount of damage it does at all. That can be good for a Level 1 character on a fresh New Game file, but as you do New Game+ runs there's huge diminishing returns on it since there's no way to make it stronger past a certain point.

Like if you invest in Sorcery you're always able to increase your INT at least a little bit. The flat damage rates of Pyromancy eventually just fall off in terms of usefulness.
I've played the game over too long a period to remember, but I can't recall many sections that are only unlockable once you've done one thing or another. IIRC, it's mostly Demon's Ruins/Izalith and of course the DLC stuff. Is it just me, or is the game almost Metroidvania-esque in its level design? Metroidvanias are a little more "do X to unlock Y section," but the basic notion of having one giant, interconnected map/world is pretty similar.
Yeah its very Metroidvania-ish. Bizarely enough though, Dark Souls 1 is the only game in the "Soulsborne" series that really does that. Demon's Souls has fairly linear levels you just teleport to, Dark Souls II merely has "spokes" in its world design that effectively function like the Demon's Souls levels, and Bloodborne comes the closest to Dark Souls 1 level design (Though not remotely as interconnected as Dark Souls 1) but there are a lot of choices they make that actively undermine that kind of exploration.

Like, all three of those have this fairly bizarre thing where you can't just level up at bonfires or their own in-game equivalent to bonfires (I forget what it is in Demon's Souls but in Bloodborne its "Lampposts"), you instead have to teleport to a central location and talk to an NPC Waifu in order to level up. It just completely breaks the flow of exploring despite being a "problem" that Dark Souls 1 had avoided completely. Like imagine if anytime in Dark Souls 1 you wanted to level up you had to teleport to Firelink Shrine.

Bloodborne also does away with any kind of Estus system and goes back to the Demon's Souls system of consumable resoratives for health which is just maddening.

The other games have their own good aspects of course and its not like Dark Souls itself is flawless, but its so weird that so many of its really good ideas are just ignored by later games which instead look back to Demon's Souls for inspiration. So you just end up with this really weird series where it feels like FromSoft just never perfected the formula they worked in for so many years the way that say, Capcom did with the original run of Resident Evil from 1996 to 2003 or so where most would agree that REmake is clearly the best game in that style. There's no Souls equivalent to REmake that really expresses the ideas they're going for nearly perfectly.

I should also again emphasize that I haven't played Dark Souls 3 myself yet but the general reception to it seems to indicate that it has plenty of problems of its own.
I also played Myst as a kid. I picked it up from a used game shop on a whim for PS. I'd only vaguely heard about its reputation but didn't know anything about. This was also pre-internet (for me) and I didn't know of any game guides for it (though I'm sure they probably existed). So I basically played that game guideless. I did finish it, but, man, looking back I don't know how I solved some of those puzzles. The one you mentioned certainly, but I also recall getting completely lost in the tree world and that underground cart thing. Eventually I remember in those sections I had to literally get out a piece of paper and pencil and draw the different possible paths I'd tried to work out which ones didn't work and how they connected to each other.
Yeah there was no way in hell I was going to bother figuring that cart nonsense on my own lol. I probably could have gotten the rest of tree world on my own though had I banged my head against it for another hour or so.
But I have no doubt of Myst's influence. It was absolutely the first of its kind, perhaps really the only of its kind. It was unprecedented to just drop people in a world with really no information and just expect them to start solving puzzles that aren't even (at first) obviously puzzles. The sense of discovery was so much of what that game was about. Hence my little "myst-ery" allusion when talking about Dark Souls. I can see it in Lost as well, but of course Lost is much more overtly story/character driven while Myst is, well, not.
Honestly I was surprised how much of Myst's story did end up in Lost. Like the two brothers in Myst might as well be Jacob and Man in Black. But yeah its a really bold game- whatever quibbles I do have with it, I still really respect it.
As for how it became such a cultural phenomenon, I also think there's something similar to Dark Souls there too where it probably became a communal effort to figure everything out because the game just doesn't hold your hand at all. I think there's something about games that demand you DIY, and that feel deeply rewarding when you do, that can easily create that kind of gaming or even socio-cultural phenomenon. I mean, I almost regret using guides as much as I have for Dark Souls because I'm sure it would've been a much more rewarding experience trying to do it all alone and blind, but these days there's just so many games to play that it's hard to justify wasting all that extra time just figuring out where to go and what to do, and I also think that element was probably way more important to Myst than to DS (DS still has all the other gamey stuff that's challenging without that exploration aspect).
Yeah, though I will say I think in its day Myst was probably more popular and well known than Dark Souls is now. Like John Goodman isn't signing on to do a Dark Souls parody game lol.

I would play Dark Souls: John Goodman Must Prepare to Die Edition though, that sounds badass.
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Re: Rax/Maz/Jimbo 2020 Games Thread: "S.T.A.R.S...."

Post by Raxivace »

Oh yeah, one last thing about Artorias, that perhaps Lyndon might appreciate. He's basically just straightup Guts from Berserk, to the point that the promotional art of him is literally just one of Guts' most iconic poses.

Image

I read Berserk after I had played through Dark Souls and man a lot of the game's monsters and such are pulled straight out of there lol. Like even the Bonewheel guys are in Berserk.
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Re: Rax/Maz/Jimbo 2020 Games Thread: "S.T.A.R.S...."

Post by Eva Yojimbo »

Finished Dark Souls. Before I do the review, I'll just say that Manus and Gwyn were a bit disappointing after Artorias and Kalameet. I beat both on the first try by mostly just tanking them. I assume Gwyn was really designed to be tackled before the DLCs, so it's a bit understandable he was on the easy side.

---

Image

Dark Souls (Remastered) - 9/10

This vies with Spiderman PS4 for the second best game I've played since I've been back to gaming (both behind Witcher 3, and not counting MGS2 since it was technically a replay); but of all the games I've played it's probably the most unique. I can easily see why this series became such a gaming phenomenon, because, as I mentioned before, it has that Myst-like element of being dropped in a haunting world with no real clue as to what's going on, where to go, or what to do (other than killing enemies); but layered on top of that mystery and discovery is a deceptively simple, surprisingly deep, tough-as-nails action RPG that takes place in Metroidvania-like level designs without any hand-holding whatsoever. The result feels like this ingenious meshing of disparate genres that normally don't go together, but work together almost perfectly.

The highlights are difficult to enumerate because they're plentiful. Perhaps the aspect I appreciated most was that intricately interwoven level design combined with the melancholic, depressive (even oppressive) tone the game maintained throughout. Somehow it managed to be rather tonally monotonous (not a bad thing in this case) while still giving each area its own feel, atmosphere, and identity. Like, it's telling that perhaps the saddest, most haunting music is played at Firelink Shrine, essentially the safe, "home base" that you return through throughout the game, so even your "safe space" isn't immune from that tone. Probably my favorite level was Anor Londo because of just how drop-dead gorgeous it was; but The Painted World of Aramis isn't far behind. While it was a PITA there's no denying how awesome Blighttown's design is, with its complex of upper-level ladders and wheels that lead to a huge, open-spaced poison marsh. In a game full of atmosphere, Ash lake and Darkroot Garden/Basin take the cake, the former with its immense choral score, and the latter mostly for its lighting (or lack thereof).

If the level design tops my list of favorite DS elements, the boss design isn't far behind. Even the bosses that were rather poor from a gameplay mechanic aspect (like Hydra or Bed of Chaos) were still pretty awesome from a visual perspective. Again, highlights are plentiful. From a visual perspective I loved The Gaping Dragon, but Kalameet and Artorias from the DLC probably take the cake as being the best challenges. I actually think this game did a remarkable job of balancing toughness and fairness. It has just enough of the old-school "repeat section/boss, memorize patterns, get better at exploiting them" aspect, but it never crossed the line into frustration for me. Part of that may be because the combat system is just so well-designed despite its simplicity. You only have five real options: light-attack, strong-attack, Magic/Pyromancy/Miracle, dodge, block. Yet, in that simplicity comes a chess-like strategy of managing distance, positioning, and stamina, and the best strategy changes depending on your build and the enemy. It's not the most exciting system compared to something like God of War or even Witcher 3, but it also avoids the button-mashing, hack-and-slash tendencies of the former and the occasional clunkiness of the latter. To me, this is probably the best balance I've seen between the tactical nature of turn-based RPGs with the action of real-time RPGs.

As also mentioned before, the replay of this game seems incredibly high. Different builds would change the nature of how you play completely. I went with a nearly 100% melee/tank build, which I imagine is completely different from Sorcery, which is different from a light, Dex-based roller, which is different from a Faith or Pyromancy build, or even some kind of mix. Plus, as Rax mentioned, the mostly-open nature of the level design would make for a nearly infinite amount of combinations in terms of which areas to visit/complete first, second, third, etc., though I'm sure some paths would be less-optimal at low-levels on a first playthrough (I've heard many newbies get slaughtered in the graveyard). One thing we didn't talk about was all the semi-side-quests involving NPCs. I don't think I actually completed any of them besides one where the Firekeeper is murdered. I know I didn't get the "best ending" for Solaire or Rhea, nor did I finish Sigmeyer's stuff. None of that's probably too important, but it's stuff I'd like to keep in mind on a replay.

All that positivity aside, the game certainly isn't perfect. By far the biggest flaw is the amount of long treks through empty areas you have to take. This can especially be annoying for boss fights where you die and then have to trek a good minute or two just to get back to the bosses's domain. I could understand this if the point was, as in old-school NES games, to make the player proceed through the normal enemies to get back to the boss, but often this isn't even the case. Like with Kalameet, the only enemies between the bonfire and him are a few relatively harmless zombie dogs. The result makes the game feel much more of a grind than it should be. Perhaps the most egregious here is Ash Lake where it's a comically long trek from the bonfire, to the Hydra, then to the dragon. This doesn't ruin the game by any means, but it's an egregious enough flaw where I could easily see myself giving this game a 10/10 if this didn't exist.

As for other flaws, there's no denying that Demon Ruins and Lost Izalith are much less interesting areas than most everything else in the game. It's also among the most egregious "long empty trek" areas, and even the bosses range from "meh" (Centipede) to dull (Ceaseless Discharge), to annoying (Bed of Chaos). It's a shame, too, because, considering they're so near the end of the game, finishing these areas is mostly a slog and leaves something of a bad aftertaste when you finish. Luckily, the DLC helps to make up for this somewhat with a trio of good bosses (even though Manus was easy, he was still far more interesting than the former trio) and an interesting parallel world/time look at Darkroot Garden.

All-in-all, this was just a superb game that I regret it took me so long to finish. I'm actually really interested in a second playthrough. Certainly once I get through some more games it's absolutely on the top of my list to revisit. It's also got me really excited for its sequels, Demon's Souls, Bloodbourne, and Sekiro. Even if none of them end up bettering DS, this is just such an interesting mash-up of genres that I think it would be difficult to screw it up so badly that the games sucked.

EDIT: Occurred to me I didn't mention the online stuff at all. On the one hand, I think online play could be fascinating given the different Covenants and the varying "goals" of each, whether it's helping other players, invading other players, or protecting a certain area from other players. The only problem being that I just didn't care for actual PvP much. Dark Souls isn't a fighting game, afterall, and while its limited controls make for interesting encounters with the AI because it becomes a game of memorizing patterns and taking advantage of openings, you can't really do that with human players. Plus, at least on a first playthrough, PvP is a bit annoying when you're trying to make it through an area and have to stop everything to battle an invader. I was probably slightly better than 50/50 against other players, but part of that was probably just my impatience/frustration with dealing with them. Plus, I don't think tank builds work very well against other players because it's too easy for them to run around and backstab, or parry your slow weapons. That said, on a second playthrough I might stick with one of the covenants that are there to help other players, and co-op'ing boss battles sounds much more fun.

On a side note, the game actually has me interested in checking out Dark Souls: The Board Game. I might could convince my dad to play it with me, though I've heard it's possible to play solo too. Looks pretty good from what I've seen of it.
Last edited by Eva Yojimbo on Sat Jul 18, 2020 1:53 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Rax/Maz/Jimbo 2020 Games Thread: "S.T.A.R.S...."

Post by Eva Yojimbo »

Any advice on what to start next? The list of games I own on PSN is stupidly long now because even during my gaming hiatus I kept buying stuff as they had sales and even got a lot of games for free. I'm actually keeping an Excel list of games I have now and it's at 284, but that's also me listing every game in bundles (like Mega Man/Contra/Castlevania) separately--I mean, there was like *checks* 19 Mega Man games alone--and also includes a few I plan to get but haven't yet. I was thinking of maybe trying out another franchise like Batman Arkham, Tomb Raider, Uncharted, DMC, etc. I was thinking maybe the Batman since I've heard it inspired Spider-Man, and that would be a nice change of pace from RPGs.
Raxivace wrote:
Kalameet may be my favorite boss in the game so far...
He's a really cool fight. I really struggled again him on my Level 1 run, even with several White Phantoms helping me. What a tough son of a bitch.
When you say "Level 1 run" do you mean you never leveled up past level 1? [gonemad]
Raxivace wrote:
Eva Yojimbo wrote:I don't think there's really much of any "storytelling" per se in DS. It's more what I'd call "lore" or world-building...
I mean, I like the melancholic atmosphere itself a lot, but I dunno. Lore/world-building on its own doesn't mean much to me if I'm not already invested in the basic narrative.

Like people have written a lot about the backstories of Ornstein and Smough for example, but man they're still just some dudes that I have to kill to me.
I get that, but I guess for me if the world draws me in for whatever reason then I don't necessarily need the narrative aspect. I also feel like the game could easily be read as some kind of allegory in the way it uses light/dark, humanity/souls, etc. I'm not sure if you could make a coherent one out of it, but it's all very archetypal.
Raxivace wrote:
Pretty awesome. Kinda makes me wish I'd invested in Pyromancy more! LOL.
The problem with Pyromancy is that your own stats doesn't effect the amount of damage it does at all. That can be good for a Level 1 character on a fresh New Game file, but as you do New Game+ runs there's huge diminishing returns on it since there's no way to make it stronger past a certain point.

Like if you invest in Sorcery you're always able to increase your INT at least a little bit. The flat damage rates of Pyromancy eventually just fall off in terms of usefulness.
Makes sense. I'd still eventually like to try another run with every major possible build: Faith, Dex, Pyromancy, Sorcery, etc.
Raxivace wrote:
I've played the game over too long a period to remember, but I can't recall many sections that are only unlockable once you've done one thing or another. IIRC, it's mostly Demon's Ruins/Izalith and of course the DLC stuff. Is it just me, or is the game almost Metroidvania-esque in its level design? Metroidvanias are a little more "do X to unlock Y section," but the basic notion of having one giant, interconnected map/world is pretty similar.
Yeah its very Metroidvania-ish. Bizarely enough though, Dark Souls 1 is the only game in the "Soulsborne" series that really does that...
Shame to hear that's the only game in the series that does that because it's definitely one of my favorite aspects. Also strange RE not being able to level up at bonfires, but doing it at a central location might not be too bad, at least as long as you're able to get there fairly easily. DS would've been awful early on if that was the case because there's no warping between areas for a while, so leveling up at Bonfires is a necessity rather than always having to trek back to Firelink. Come to think of it though, it might've added a level of challenge and drama/suspense in terms of always worrying about losing your souls/humanity before reclaiming it. I think that ended up only happening to me a couple of times and it would've been interesting to build the game around that mechanic, though they might've had to make enemies/areas a bit easier just to make sure it didn't get too frustrating. Trade-offs, I guess.

Even if FromSoft never perfected the formula, as long as the other games are close to DS in quality I probably won't complain too much. Like, even if most are 8s with maybe one other 9, it would still be an awesome series.
Raxivace wrote:
I also played Myst as a kid... I also recall getting completely lost in the tree world and that underground cart thing. Eventually I remember in those sections I had to literally get out a piece of paper and pencil and draw the different possible paths I'd tried to work out which ones didn't work and how they connected to each other.
Yeah there was no way in hell I was going to bother figuring that cart nonsense on my own lol. I probably could have gotten the rest of tree world on my own though had I banged my head against it for another hour or so.
I actually remember the cart/trees were pretty easy once I drew the map. Made me wonder what took me so long to try that. I mean, how many games demand that kind of outside-the-box thinking from players?
Raxivace wrote:Honestly I was surprised how much of Myst's story did end up in Lost. Like the two brothers in Myst might as well be Jacob and Man in Black. But yeah its a really bold game- whatever quibbles I do have with it, I still really respect it.
Good point, though it's been so long I remember almost nothing about Myst's story.
As for how it became such a cultural phenomenon, I also think there's something similar to Dark Souls there too where it probably became a communal effort to figure everything out because the game just doesn't hold your hand at all....
Yeah, though I will say I think in its day Myst was probably more popular and well known than Dark Souls is now. Like John Goodman isn't signing on to do a Dark Souls parody game lol.

I would play Dark Souls: John Goodman Must Prepare to Die Edition though, that sounds badass.[/quote]That's fair. I'd say DS is more of a hardcore gamers phenomenon while Myst extended outside that to casual gamers as well. Maybe the equivalent of Spielberg (Myst) VS Lynch (Dark Souls). I could definitely see John Goodman playing a Dark Souls NPC at the very least. [yes]
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Re: Rax/Maz/Jimbo 2020 Games Thread: "S.T.A.R.S...."

Post by Raxivace »

Awesome review. I think perhaps the best thing I can say about Dark Souls is that despite the flaws it does have and regardless of the story working for someone or not, there's this "more than the sum of its parts" aspects that really keeps calling to you, and burrows in your mind. It's just fun to pick up and play, to try new things and run around these challenges.
Eva Yojimbo wrote:I know I didn't get the "best ending" for Solaire or Rhea, nor did I finish Sigmeyer's stuff. None of that's probably too important, but it's stuff I'd like to keep in mind on a replay.
You should look into how you're supposed to get Solaire's best ending at least. It's really bizarre and I have no idea how you're meant to figure it out.

I should mention that I do genuinely like these NPC sidequests myself. I almost always go out of my way to save Solaire because he's a bro. Praise the Sun.

Also if you do save him, he's available as a summon sign against the final boss.
All that positivity aside, the game certainly isn't perfect. By far the biggest flaw is the amount of long treks through empty areas you have to take.
Yeah this reallly frustrated me when I first played the game.

Dark Souls II's Crown of the Ivory King DLC is the worst about this though, as there's an area where the run from the bonfire to the boss is straight up like 5-10 minues long.
As for other flaws, there's no denying that Demon Ruins and Lost Izalith are much less interesting areas than most everything else in the game. It's also among the most egregious "long empty trek" areas, and even the bosses range from "meh" (Centipede) to dull (Ceaseless Discharge), to annoying (Bed of Chaos).
The Demon Firesage is kind of my favorite bit weirdness here. Beyond being a repeat of the Asylum bosses but with a fire theme, his big weakness is...fire. [gonemad]
though Manus was easy
I always had a tough time with Manus, though maybe its because I've never did a tank build against him really.
On a side note, the game actually has me interested in checking out Dark Souls: The Board Game. I might could convince my dad to play it with me, though I've heard it's possible to play solo too. Looks pretty good from what I've seen of it.
There's a board game? [gonemad]
Last edited by Raxivace on Sat Jul 18, 2020 2:53 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Rax/Maz/Jimbo 2020 Games Thread: "S.T.A.R.S...."

Post by Raxivace »

Eva Yojimbo wrote:Any advice on what to start next? The list of games I own on PSN is stupidly long now because even during my gaming hiatus I kept buying stuff as they had sales and even got a lot of games for free. I'm actually keeping an Excel list of games I have now and it's at 284, but that's also me listing every game in bundles (like Mega Man/Contra/Castlevania) separately--I mean, there was like *checks* 19 Mega Man games alone--and also includes a few I plan to get but haven't yet. I was thinking of maybe trying out another franchise like Batman Arkham, Tomb Raider, Uncharted, DMC, etc. I was thinking maybe the Batman since I've heard it inspired Spider-Man, and that would be a nice change of pace from RPGs.
Uh is there anything specifically you're in the mood for? I haven't played any of the Batman Arkham games myself, haven't touched a Tomb Raider in years, don't have much experience with DMC outside of 1 (Which was good but shows its age) and 2 (Which is bad), and the only Uncharted game I played was 2 and I hated that. If you liked The Last of Us's gameplay you'll probably like Uncharted 2 though, while the story is just basic Indiana Jones stuff (Though with less charismatic characters IMHO).

It's a shame Maz is so busy lately, he'd have better recommendations for you among these western games than I would.

Castlevania is my favorite from that bunch but those might not be quite what you want right after Dark Souls.
When you say "Level 1 run" do you mean you never leveled up past level 1? [gonemad]
Indeed! Instead of leveling you end up focusing on Pyromancy and keeping weapons and armor maintained.
Eva Yojimbo wrote:I'm not sure if you could make a coherent one out of it, but it's all very archetypal.
Yeah. The whole dying world aspect feels particularly relevant right now even with how much shit seems to suck just about everywhere.

Shame to hear that's the only game in the series that does that because it's definitely one of my favorite aspects. Also strange RE not being able to level up at bonfires, but doing it at a central location might not be too bad, at least as long as you're able to get there fairly easily. DS would've been awful early on if that was the case because there's no warping between areas for a while, so leveling up at Bonfires is a necessity rather than always having to trek back to Firelink. Come to think of it though, it might've added a level of challenge and drama/suspense in terms of always worrying about losing your souls/humanity before reclaiming it. I think that ended up only happening to me a couple of times and it would've been interesting to build the game around that mechanic, though they might've had to make enemies/areas a bit easier just to make sure it didn't get too frustrating. Trade-offs, I guess.

Even if FromSoft never perfected the formula, as long as the other games are close to DS in quality I probably won't complain too much. Like, even if most are 8s with maybe one other 9, it would still be an awesome series.
Yeah in DeS/DSII/Bloodborne you can just teleport there from the beginning, you don't have to unlock it, but still. It just feels like an unnecesary extra step in DSII and Bloodborne at least.

I'm not sure how I'd rank the other games in comparison to Dark Souls 1 these days without replaying them. Like Dark Souls 2 for example probably averages out similarly to Dark Souls 1 to me, but in the sense that while it doesn't have as many lows as Dark Souls 1 does, it doesn't have quite as many highs either.
I actually remember the cart/trees were pretty easy once I drew the map. Made me wonder what took me so long to try that. I mean, how many games demand that kind of outside-the-box thinking from players?
I gotta be honest I generally don't like having to dig out paper to play a video game lol, and I'm guessing a lot of others are like that.
Good point, though it's been so long I remember almost nothing about Myst's story.
Myst's actual story is kind of whatever with some real bad acting, but I guess its kind of beside the point with Myst somewhat.
Last edited by Raxivace on Sat Jul 18, 2020 2:48 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Rax/Maz/Jimbo 2020 Games Thread: "S.T.A.R.S...."

Post by Raxivace »

Troll option: You should play Lost: Via Domus.
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Re: Rax/Maz/Jimbo 2020 Games Thread: "S.T.A.R.S...."

Post by Eva Yojimbo »

Just a few quick things before I have to go eat/workout, then probably spend the rest of the day on gaming/music:
Raxivace wrote:There's a board game? [gonemad]
Yes, and it's pretty damn expensive: https://www.amazon.com/Dark-Souls-The-B ... B01MXLB67B There's also like a dozen expansion sets that are $30-$40 a piece. I watched a few YouTube Playthroughs and the basic idea is you enter rooms/areas with a random (via card deck) group of enemies that have specific moves/actions. You beat them (by rolling dice) to get souls, spend that to draw cards to upgrade your gear/stats, before you go to the boss room, which is similar but tougher. You basically have a 10-point scale from which you take damage but also use to spend stamina on movement, dodges, and/or certain attacks, so there's some strategy in managing risk/reward. Like, you could spend 8 stamina to do a big move and then a huge attack (potentially), but if you don't kill the enemy and they attack you, they'd only have to do 2 damage to kill you. With multiple players you just take turns (not sure how this affects difficulty tbh). If you clear a room your damage/stamina resets and you back to the "bonfire" to spend your souls. If you die everything resets and you have three "lives" to beat the boss, though you could homebrew away that rule.
Raxivace wrote:
Eva Yojimbo wrote:Any advice on what to start next? The list of games I own on PSN is stupidly long now because even during my gaming hiatus I kept buying stuff as they had sales and even got a lot of games for free. I'm actually keeping an Excel list of games I have now and it's at 284, but that's also me listing every game in bundles (like Mega Man/Contra/Castlevania) separately--I mean, there was like *checks* 19 Mega Man games alone--and also includes a few I plan to get but haven't yet. I was thinking of maybe trying out another franchise like Batman Arkham, Tomb Raider, Uncharted, DMC, etc. I was thinking maybe the Batman since I've heard it inspired Spider-Man, and that would be a nice change of pace from RPGs.
Uh is there anything specifically you're in the mood for? I haven't played any of the Batman Arkham games myself, haven't touched a Tomb Raider in years, don't have much experience with DMC outside of 1 (Which was good but shows its age) and 2 (Which is bad), and the only Uncharted game I played was 2 and I hated that. If you liked The Last of Us's gameplay you'll probably like Uncharted 2 though, while the story is just basic Indiana Jones stuff (Though with less charismatic characters IMHO).

It's a shame Maz is so busy lately, he'd have better recommendations for you among these western games than I would.

Castlevania is my favorite from that bunch but those might not be quite what you want right after Dark Souls.
My mood right now is "anything that isn't a dark/oppressive action RPG," lol. I was just throwing out some possibilities I had in mind, but if you have anything else (even if it's not among those I mentioned) feel free to recommend. I actually did play the first DMC back in the day but I honestly can't remember if I finished it or not. This might break Gendo's board, but here's a list of games I have (mostly, except for those handful I mentioned I'm planning to get but haven't yet):

Assassin's Creed
Assassin's Creed II
Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood
Assassin's Creed: Revelations
Assassin's Creed III
Assassin's Creed III: Liberation
Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag
Assassin's Creed: Freedom Cry
Assassin's Creed: Rogue
Assassin's Creed Unity
Assassin's Creed Chronicles
Assassin's Creed Syndicate
Assassin's Creed Origins
Assassin's Creed Odyssey
Banner Saga
Banner Saga 2
Banner Saga 3
Batman: Arkham Asylum
Batman: Arkham City
Batman: Arkham Knight
Battlefield 4
Battlefield Hardline
Battlefield I
Battlefield V
BioShock
BioShock 2
BioShock Infinite
BlazBlue Central Fiction
Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon
Borderlands
Borderlands 2
Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel
Call of Duty: WWII
Castlevania: Rondo of Blood
Castlevania: Symphony of the Night
Castlevania: Harmony of Despair
Castlevania
Castlevania II Simon's Quest
Castlevania III Dracula's Curse
Super Castlevania IV
Castlevania The Adventure
Castlevania II Belmont's Revenge
Castlevania Bloodlines
Kid Dracula
Chrono Trigger
Chrono Cross
Contra
Super Contra
Super C
Contra III: The Alien Wars
Operation C
Contra Hard Corps
Super Probotector Alien Rebels
Contra: Rogue Corps
Probotector
Darkest Dungeon
Darksiders
Darksiders II
Darksiders III
Destiny 2
Demon's Souls
Dark Souls
Dark Souls 2
Bloodborne
Dark Souls 3
Dead Cells
Dragon's Dogma
Deux Ex: Human Revolution
Deux Ex: Mankind Divided
Detroit: Become Human
Divinity: Original Sin
Divinity: Original Sin II
Devil May Cry
Devil May Cry 2
Devil May Cry 3
Devil May Cry 4
Devil May Cry: DmC
Devil May Cry 5
Diablo III: Reaper of Souls
Dishonored
Dishonored 2
Dishonored: Death of the Outsider
Doom
Drakengard 3
Dragon Age: Origins
Dragon Age II
Dragon Age: Inquisition
Dragon Quest XI
Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Erica
Evil Within
Evil Within 2
Exist Archive: The Other Side of the Sky
Fallout 4
Far Cry
Far Cry 2
Far Cry 3
Far Cry 4
Far Cry Primal
Far Cry 5
Far Cry New Dawn
Final Fantasy I
Final Fantasy II
Final Fantasy III
Final Fantasy IV
Final Fantasy V
Final Fantasy VI
Final Fantasy Tactics
Final Fantasy VII
Final Fantasy VIII
Final Fantasy IX
Final Fantasy X
Final Fantasy X-2
Final Fantasy XII
Final Fantasy IV: The After Years
Final Fantasy XIII
Final Fantasy Type-0
Final Fantasy XIII-2
Final Fantasy Lightning Returns
Final Fantasy XV
Ghostbusters: The Video Game
God of War
God of War II
God of War III
God of War PS4
Grand Theft Auto 3
Grand Theft Auto: Vice City
Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas
Grand Theft Auto IV
Grand Theft Auto V
Grim Fandango
Guacamelee
Guacamelee 2
Guilty Gear Xrd -Sign-
Guilty Gear Xrd -Revelator-
A Hate in Time
Heavy Rain
Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice
Hitman 2: Silent Assassin
Hitman: Contracts
Hitman: Blood Money
Hitman: Absolution
Hitman
Hitman 2
Horizon Zero Dawn
Ikaruga
Inside
Jak & Daxter: The Precursor Legacy
Jak 2
Jak 3
Jak X: Combat Racing
Journey
Kingdom Come: Deliverance
Kingdom Hearts 1.5
Kingdom Hearts 2.5
Kingdom Hearts 2.8
Kingdom Hearts 3
Last of Us, The
Last of Us, The II
Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel
Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel II
Ultimate Marvel Vs. Capcopm 3
Marvel's Spider-Man
Mega Man
Mega Man 2
Mega Man 3
Mega Man 4
Mega Man 5
Mega Man 6
Mega Man X
Mega Man X2
Mega Man 7
Mega Man X3
Mega Man 8
Mega Man X4
Mega Man X5
Mega Man X6
Mega Man X7
Mega Man X8
Mega Man 9
Mega Man 10
Mega Man 11
Metal Gear Solid 2
Metal Gear Solid 3
Metal Gear Solid 4
Metal Gear Solid 5
Metro 2033
Metro: Last Light
Metro: Exodus
Monster Hunter
Monster Hunter 2
Monster Hunter World
Moonlighter
Nier: Automata
Nioh
Odin Sphere Leifthrasir
Okami
Oninaki
Outer Wilds
Outlast
Outlast: Whistleblower
Outlast 2
Outward
Overwatch
Pillars of Eternity
Prey
A Plague Tale: Innocence
Pyre
Ratchet & Clank
Ratchet & Clank: Going Commando
Ratchet & Clank: Up Your Arsenal
Ratchet: Deadlocked
Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction
Ratchet & Clank Future: A Crack in Time
Ratchet & Clank: Into the Nexus
Ratchet & Clank PS4
Red Dead Redemption 2
Resident Evil 3
Resident Evil - Code: Veronica X
Resident Evil
Resident Evil Zero
Resident Evil 4
Resident Evil 5
Resident Evil 6
Resident Evil: Revelations
Resident Evil: Revelations 2
Resident Evil 7: Biohazard
Resident Evil 2
Resident Evil 3
Secret of Mana
Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice
Shadow of the Colossus
Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun
Shenmue
Shenmue II
Shenmue III
Skullgirls 2nd Encore
Sniper Elite 4
Soulcalibur VI
Star Wars Battlefront II
Street Fighter IV
Street Fighter V
Strider
Swords of Ditto
Tales of Symphonia
Tales of Legendia
Tales of the Abyss
Tales of Vesperia
Tales of Graces
Tales of Xillia
Tales of Xillia 2
Tales of Zestiria
Tales of Berseria
Tekken 7
Titanfall 2
Tomb Raider
Rise of the Tomb Raider
Shadow of the Tomb Raider
Trine
Trine 2
Trine 3
Trine 4
Uncharted: Drake's Fortune
Uncharted 2: Among Thieves
Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception
Uncharted 4: A Thief's End
Uncharted: The Lost Legacy
Under Night In-Birth Exe:Late[st]
Until Dawn
Until Dawn: Rush of Blood
The Walking Dead S1
The Walking Dead S2
The Walking Dead S3
The Walking Dead S4
Wipeout
Witcher
Witcher 2
Witcher 3
Wolfenstein: The New Order
Wolfenstein: The Old Blood
Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus
Wolfenstein: Youngblood
Yakuza 3
Yakuza 4
Yakuza 5
Yakuza Kiwami
Yakuza 0
Yakuza Kiwami 2
Yakuza 6
Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors
Zero Escape: Virtue's Last Reward
Zero Time Dilemma
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Re: Rax/Maz/Jimbo 2020 Games Thread: "S.T.A.R.S...."

Post by Raxivace »

I'll comment on the games I actually played.
Eva Yojimbo wrote: Assassin's Creed
This is the only AC game I actually finished. I actually liked it well enough back in the day, though I got a few hours in ACII before just getting bored with the franchise altogether.

Not really sure how much they have in common with the more modern AC games that have RPG elements though.
BioShock 2
BioShock Infinite
I really liked BioShock 2 and found it to be very underrated. Probably the best gameplay in the trilogy.

Infinite I think kind of sucked all around. The story I think is arguably racist, but even if you put that to the side that gameplay is a very uninspired, very badly done Halo knockoff, which is particularly stupid for a game set in like 1910 or some shit. Me and Maz talked about it a lot in my 2017 games thread.
BlazBlue Central Fiction
I only played Calamity Trigger, which I liked though I never could wrap my head around the game's story. Its fun at least. I've been going through the Melty Blood games on the side lately and I think the combination of fighting game + visual novel that BlazBlue uses probably came from there.
Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon
Of course I liked the Bloodstained games. I need to get back to Curse of the Moon 2 at some point.
Castlevania: Rondo of Blood
Castlevania: Symphony of the Night
Castlevania: Harmony of Despair
Castlevania
Castlevania II Simon's Quest
Castlevania III Dracula's Curse
Super Castlevania IV
Castlevania The Adventure
Castlevania II Belmont's Revenge
Castlevania Bloodlines
Kid Dracula
Again I love the Castlevania games. The original NES game goes pretty quick if you want something that's a fair challenge but not too long.
Chrono Trigger
Chrono Cross
I liked CT a lot but haven't played it since 2008 or so. Cross I never played but its very divisive.
Evil Within
Evil Within 2
I liked both of these but they're not quite as refined as the RE games that Mikami worked on.
Final Fantasy I
Final Fantasy II
Final Fantasy III
Final Fantasy IV
Final Fantasy V
Final Fantasy VI
Final Fantasy Tactics
Final Fantasy VII
Final Fantasy VIII
Final Fantasy IX
Final Fantasy X
Final Fantasy X-2
Final Fantasy XII
Final Fantasy IV: The After Years
Final Fantasy XIII
Final Fantasy Type-0
Final Fantasy XIII-2
Final Fantasy Lightning Returns
Final Fantasy XV
This is a list of games in the Final Fantasy franchise.
Jak & Daxter: The Precursor Legacy
Jak 2
Jak 3
I enjoyed all of these, and I think Jak 3 was the last time I actually liked a Naughty Dog game.
Kingdom Hearts 1.5
Kingdom Hearts 2.5
Kingdom Hearts 2.8
Kingdom Hearts 3
I love KH but its worth pointing out between 1.5, 2.5, and 2.8 there are 6 games and three "movies" (Which feel more like cutscene compilations more than anything, two of which are for games they would have had to remake from the ground up to give them an HD release).
Last of Us, The
Last of Us, The II
Well you could play Last of Us II I guess since people are still big into talking about it right now.
Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel
Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel II
I haven't played these myself yet but I know people seem to like them. I have the PS4 versions.
Ultimate Marvel Vs. Capcopm 3
This is fun, though I wish MvC2 would get a modern release as well.
Metal Gear Solid 3
Metal Gear Solid 4
Metal Gear Solid 5
You could always do more MGS of course.
Nier: Automata
Play OG Nier before this.
Resident Evil 3
Resident Evil - Code: Veronica X
Resident Evil
Resident Evil Zero
Resident Evil 4
Resident Evil 5
Resident Evil 6
Resident Evil: Revelations
Resident Evil: Revelations 2
Resident Evil 7: Biohazard
Resident Evil 2
Resident Evil 3
There's always more RE too. I'd be curious to know your thoughts on any of these, of course.
Shenmue
Shenmue II
Shenmue III
I liked the Shenmue games but I feel like they gradually got worse as they went along, with Shenmue III honestly being a pointless addition to the story in some ways. My review should be on the previous page.
Soulcalibur VI
It's fun, you can do Geralt vs. 2B in the game lol.
Street Fighter IV
Street Fighter V
I played vanilla SFIV a bit and thought it was fun but that Seth was too hard of a boss for me. SFV seems pretty unpopular though, but I haven't played it myself.
Tales of Symphonia
Tales of Legendia
Tales of the Abyss
Tales of Vesperia
Tales of Graces
Tales of Xillia
Tales of Xillia 2
Tales of Zestiria
Tales of Berseria
I haven't played the Xillia's or Zesitira but I liked the other games. Berseria was my favorite, with Velvet probably being my favorite lead in the games.
Under Night In-Birth Exe:Late[st]
I haven't played this but I can't help but love that title. Its from the Melty Blood devs (The gameplay side anyways) too so its probably good. Looks like they even throw in Sion from MB too as a guest character, and she's awesome because she wears a beret and shoots mother fuckers and is also a vampire.

EDIT: Wait it might not actually be a beret after all. I feel like everything I thought I knew is a lie now.
The Walking Dead S1
The Walking Dead S2
The Walking Dead S3
The Walking Dead S4
I really enjoyed S1, while the others had their ups and downs.
Yakuza 3
Yakuza 4
Yakuza 5
Yakuza Kiwami
Yakuza 0
Yakuza Kiwami 2
Yakuza 6
I need to find the time to actually play these myself too.
Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors
Zero Escape: Virtue's Last Reward
Zero Time Dilemma
I'm kind of surprised to see you have these. I enjoyed them quite a bit- there's a twist in the first game I didn't like at first though I rolled with it for VLR and ZTD and enjoyed them doubling down on it. I'd be curious to see your thoughts on a visual novel in general, even if these games throw in adventure game-y puzzle elements on top of that.
Last edited by Raxivace on Sun Jul 19, 2020 12:44 pm, edited 4 times in total.
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Re: Rax/Maz/Jimbo 2020 Games Thread: "S.T.A.R.S...."

Post by Raxivace »

tl;dr version: All those games suck compared to Lost: Via Domus. The only real flaw with Via Domus is that it doesn't have Sion from Melty Blood in it.
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Re: Rax/Maz/Jimbo 2020 Games Thread: "S.T.A.R.S...."

Post by Raxivace »

Alright the joke has gone on long enough, I have to admit I was just kidding and do not actually think you should play Lost: Via Domus, Jimbo.
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Re: Rax/Maz/Jimbo 2020 Games Thread: "S.T.A.R.S...."

Post by Eva Yojimbo »

I decided to play Batman: Arkham Asylum since I figured it would be a good change of pace. Seems like a short game too as I just started it a couple of days ago and according to the IGN guide it looks like I'm already near the end. It's a solid game so far whose biggest flaw is that it's inferior in most ways to Spiderman, a game that's 10+ years younger and basically ripped off all of B:AA's original ideas. The biggest highlight so far is just how much the game was influenced by Batman: The Animated Series, right down to having most of the original VA's including Mark Hamill's scene-stealing Joker.
Raxivace wrote:Awesome review. I think perhaps the best thing I can say about Dark Souls is that despite the flaws it does have and regardless of the story working for someone or not, there's this "more than the sum of its parts" aspects that really keeps calling to you, and burrows in your mind. It's just fun to pick up and play, to try new things and run around these challenges.
Thanks. I have a feeling that I'm going to like it as more time passes too, because I've been thinking about it a lot since I finished. I actually picked up those Design Works books before they went OOP and I've been flipping through the first book at night before bed. It's cool to see the original ideas for areas, bosses, to see how much they changed, and to see other stuff that didn't make it into the game. There's also an interesting interview with the design team at the end. Some stuff they talked about worth mentioning is that, apparently, Andre was originally at Firelink Shrine and was related to Gwyn. He was supposed to be the guardian for the Kiln of the First Flame that opens these giant doors for the player (I assume after getting the Lord Vessel). Ceaseless Discharge is actually brother to Queelag and her sisters and you can supposedly see their domain from his, the idea being that he watches over them.

Besides this lore stuff, two things that director Miyazaki said that struck me theme-wise were that he wanted the game to be "mournful" and "dignified." In my review I called the tone "melancholic" but "mournful" actually works better because it implies that you're sad over the death or passing of something, and here it seems the mournfulness comes because of the dying world, the fires going out, the long-gone heroes that first ignited the fires and the kiln, etc. The "dignified" concept struck me because it actually reminded me of a good review I read ages ago for Godard's Contempt about how in its clash of the ancient and modern that both were treated with a "stunned dignity" (for whatever reason that phrase has stuck with me). Perhaps it's a leap, but I feel like there's something similar going on in Dark Souls, that there's this mournful tone related to this dying world, but there's also this profound dignity to the world and most all of the characters. I also think Contempt's notion of contrasting the heroes of the past with the hollowness of modernity is relevant to DS's too, since I remember Solaire (IIRC) mentioning at one point that the player is stuck in a kind of twilight world where time is jumbled and the past and present have somewhat merged. If anything, it's almost like the hollows symbolize the emptiness of modernity contrasted with the vitality of the bosses that are often the heroes of the past (at least for Gwyn, Artorias, probably Sif, maybe Smaugh/Orenstein, etc.). The concept of souls/humanity could play into it as well, where battling with monsters for souls is basically a metaphor for what we do everyday, and failure to wins means losing our humanity.

That's probably reading way too much into it and I really don't think Miyazaki et al. thought of the game as an allegory (there's no indication of that in the interview; Miyazaki even explicitly said he didn't want things to be too symbolic), but I do think that "reading" accounts for something of the game's compelling, provocative, even profound tone.
Raxivace wrote:
Eva Yojimbo wrote:I know I didn't get the "best ending" for Solaire or Rhea, nor did I finish Sigmeyer's stuff. None of that's probably too important, but it's stuff I'd like to keep in mind on a replay.
You should look into how you're supposed to get Solaire's best ending at least. It's really bizarre and I have no idea how you're meant to figure it out.

I should mention that I do genuinely like these NPC sidequests myself. I almost always go out of my way to save Solaire because he's a bro. Praise the Sun.

Also if you do save him, he's available as a summon sign against the final boss.
I did check them out, which is how I knew I didn't get the best endings, lol. I agree that Solaire's is especially convoluted. I could see how I might've gotten it by accident since most of my first playthrough I'd join each new covenant I found. I just happened to not find the one that you have to join to take the shortcut through Demon Ruins/Izalith.

I just wish the side quests would've been a bit more explicit. Like, Reah's is extremely obscure as well. I don't know how the player is supposed to know that Petrus is going to betray her and you should kill him first. Then, you have to NOT buy all of her miracles or else she moves on to The Duke's Archives and goes hollow anyway.
Raxivace wrote:
All that positivity aside, the game certainly isn't perfect. By far the biggest flaw is the amount of long treks through empty areas you have to take.
Yeah this reallly frustrated me when I first played the game.

Dark Souls II's Crown of the Ivory King DLC is the worst about this though, as there's an area where the run from the bonfire to the boss is straight up like 5-10 minues long.
Yikes! You'd think they would've fixed that flaw in subsequent games.
Raxivace wrote:The Demon Firesage is kind of my favorite bit weirdness here. Beyond being a repeat of the Asylum bosses but with a fire theme, his big weakness is...fire. [gonemad]
LOL, I never noticed that. Will have to keep in mind if I eventually do a Pyromancy build playthrough.
Raxivace wrote:
though Manus was easy
I always had a tough time with Manus, though maybe its because I've never did a tank build against him really.
That's possible. It seems his hardest hitting stuff was the magic, but as long as I stayed close he rarely did any of that and it was just a matter of staying behind him. Good thing about a heavy tank build is that you're only looking for windows to get a single shot in before resetting.
Raxivace wrote:
When you say "Level 1 run" do you mean you never leveled up past level 1? [gonemad]
Indeed! Instead of leveling you end up focusing on Pyromancy and keeping weapons and armor maintained.
That's insane!
Raxivace wrote:I'm not sure how I'd rank the other games in comparison to Dark Souls 1 these days without replaying them. Like Dark Souls 2 for example probably averages out similarly to Dark Souls 1 to me, but in the sense that while it doesn't have as many lows as Dark Souls 1 does, it doesn't have quite as many highs either.
I know online people seem to really love Bloodborne too. The idea of doing a Souls game in a Gothic horror world does sound like a superb fit. Do you have any intention of playing Sekiro eventually?
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Re: Rax/Maz/Jimbo 2020 Games Thread: "S.T.A.R.S...."

Post by Raxivace »

Eva Yojimbo wrote:The biggest highlight so far is just how much the game was influenced by Batman: The Animated Series, right down to having most of the original VA's including Mark Hamill's scene-stealing Joker.
The one thing I'll say about this is that it blew my mind about a decade or so ago when I first learned that Mark Hamill played the Joker in TAS. Just seemed like something I should have picked up on before then.

Also doesn't Arkham Asylum have like a "detective vision" mechanic or something? I seem to remember something in Witcher 3 getting compared to Arkham but I can't remember the specifics.
Thanks. I have a feeling that I'm going to like it as more time passes too, because I've been thinking about it a lot since I finished. I actually picked up those Design Works books before they went OOP and I've been flipping through the first book at night before bed. It's cool to see the original ideas for areas, bosses, to see how much they changed, and to see other stuff that didn't make it into the game. There's also an interesting interview with the design team at the end. Some stuff they talked about worth mentioning is that, apparently, Andre was originally at Firelink Shrine and was related to Gwyn. He was supposed to be the guardian for the Kiln of the First Flame that opens these giant doors for the player (I assume after getting the Lord Vessel). Ceaseless Discharge is actually brother to Queelag and her sisters and you can supposedly see their domain from his, the idea being that he watches over them.
I remember looking through a Japanese PDF of that book, I wasn't aware there was an English version available.

I remember hearing some of those weird ideas about Andre before. It is kind of weird that such a mechanically important character doesn't end up just moving to Firelink.
Besides this lore stuff, two things that director Miyazaki said that struck me theme-wise were that he wanted the game to be "mournful" and "dignified." In my review I called the tone "melancholic" but "mournful" actually works better because it implies that you're sad over the death or passing of something, and here it seems the mournfulness comes because of the dying world, the fires going out, the long-gone heroes that first ignited the fires and the kiln, etc. The "dignified" concept struck me because it actually reminded me of a good review I read ages ago for Godard's Contempt about how in its clash of the ancient and modern that both were treated with a "stunned dignity" (for whatever reason that phrase has stuck with me). Perhaps it's a leap, but I feel like there's something similar going on in Dark Souls, that there's this mournful tone related to this dying world, but there's also this profound dignity to the world and most all of the characters. I also think Contempt's notion of contrasting the heroes of the past with the hollowness of modernity is relevant to DS's too, since I remember Solaire (IIRC) mentioning at one point that the player is stuck in a kind of twilight world where time is jumbled and the past and present have somewhat merged. If anything, it's almost like the hollows symbolize the emptiness of modernity contrasted with the vitality of the bosses that are often the heroes of the past (at least for Gwyn, Artorias, probably Sif, maybe Smaugh/Orenstein, etc.). The concept of souls/humanity could play into it as well, where battling with monsters for souls is basically a metaphor for what we do everyday, and failure to wins means losing our humanity.
That's a really fascinating comparison. I was thinking about Contempt myself a few weeks ago, about how the film's existence seems to foreshadow 80's Godard shift toward making films about classical art, The Bible etc.

The one thing I'll add though is that the heroes themselves in Dark Souls all seem to be have been beaten down by time themselves to some extent. Even Gwyn feels like something of an anti-climax to the game- the fight itself is still cool, but he's still one of the easier bosses and even his theme seems sad.
Eva Yojimbo wrote:I did check them out, which is how I knew I didn't get the best endings, lol. I agree that Solaire's is especially convoluted. I could see how I might've gotten it by accident since most of my first playthrough I'd join each new covenant I found. I just happened to not find the one that you have to join to take the shortcut through Demon Ruins/Izalith.
Solaire's is just weird to me because the Covenant you have to join to save him is like Chaos-based or something IIRC, which is just at odds with what Solaire stands for as a character. Like if I had to join the Sunbro covenant and farm Sunlight Medals that would be thematically coherent, but what you have to actually do is just odd.
I just wish the side quests would've been a bit more explicit. Like, Reah's is extremely obscure as well. I don't know how the player is supposed to know that Petrus is going to betray her and you should kill him first. Then, you have to NOT buy all of her miracles or else she moves on to The Duke's Archives and goes hollow anyway.
FWIW nearly every "teacher" character like that goes Hollow once you buy out their shop. But yeah the Petrus thing is odd.

That's one of the interesting things about runs where you buy every pryomancy/sorcerery/etc. in the game. You spend the first half of the game essentially building this family at Firelink and the second half of the game killing them off as you finish buying out their shops and they go Hollow. Its an interesting progression.
Yikes! You'd think they would've fixed that flaw in subsequent games.
To be fair that is the most egregious example of that in Dark Souls II by a wide margin, and possible the entire worst area in the whole franchise, but yeah.

It's also sort of like that final scenario in RE2 Ghost Survivors that I was complaining about in that its buried so deep into the game that you might not ever even find it (And unlike Ghost Survivors I don't think there's any Trophies or anything directly attached to this specific area) but yeah.
LOL, I never noticed that. Will have to keep in mind if I eventually do a Pyromancy build playthrough.
Yeah I didn't even know that until my Level 1 playthrough. I had juts assumed he would be resistant to pyromancy based on his name/location and tried to fight him without that until I looked him up and whelp.

He doesn't even do fire damage himself! It's magic damage! What the fuck.
That's possible. It seems his hardest hitting stuff was the magic, but as long as I stayed close he rarely did any of that and it was just a matter of staying behind him. Good thing about a heavy tank build is that you're only looking for windows to get a single shot in before resetting.
There is also an item you can find in part of the DLC to deflect one of his magic attacks but I have trouble with the timing on it sometimes.
That's insane!
Its not even the hardest Level 1 run in an action RPG lol, if only because you can always summon phantoms for help. Kingdom Hearts II and III both have harder Level 1 challenges IMHO.
I know online people seem to really love Bloodborne too. The idea of doing a Souls game in a Gothic horror world does sound like a superb fit. Do you have any intention of playing Sekiro eventually?
Eventually I'll probably play Sekiro, yeah.
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Re: Rax/Maz/Jimbo 2020 Games Thread: "S.T.A.R.S...."

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I do like this video about Sekiro though which might as well be about Dark Souls.
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Re: Rax/Maz/Jimbo 2020 Games Thread: "S.T.A.R.S...."

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Meanwhile, in Fate/Grand Order's most recent event...

Image

This game continues to deal with DEEP thematic ideas like "What if Charles Babbage was a steam powered robot?" and "If Charles Babbage was a robot, could we turn him into a car or something?". Truly heady stuff, probably too intellectual for most people here.
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Re: Rax/Maz/Jimbo 2020 Games Thread: "S.T.A.R.S...."

Post by Eva Yojimbo »

Raxivace wrote:
Eva Yojimbo wrote:The biggest highlight so far is just how much the game was influenced by Batman: The Animated Series, right down to having most of the original VA's including Mark Hamill's scene-stealing Joker.
The one thing I'll say about this is that it blew my mind about a decade or so ago when I first learned that Mark Hamill played the Joker in TAS. Just seemed like something I should have picked up on before then.

Also doesn't Arkham Asylum have like a "detective vision" mechanic or something? I seem to remember something in Witcher 3 getting compared to Arkham but I can't remember the specifics.
I think it was my mom that told me as a kid that the guy who did the Joker's voice was the guy who played Luke Skywalker. Blew my mind even back then.

Yeah, there's indeed a "detective vision" mode in the game that you use to find/follow clues. You can also use it to basically see where baddies are during stealth sections.
Raxivace wrote:That's a really fascinating comparison. I was thinking about Contempt myself a few weeks ago, about how the film's existence seems to foreshadow 80's Godard shift toward making films about classical art, The Bible etc.

The one thing I'll add though is that the heroes themselves in Dark Souls all seem to be have been beaten down by time themselves to some extent. Even Gwyn feels like something of an anti-climax to the game- the fight itself is still cool, but he's still one of the easier bosses and even his theme seems sad.
That's a good point too about Contempt foreshadowing 80s Godard's obsessions. It's almost kinda weird that such a radical progressive seems to also have this profound nostalgia for the past. Reminds me of the theory that people are either Edenists or Utopians; the Edenists think that paradise is something that was lost in the distant past, while Utopians think that paradise is something we'll find in the future. Typically, liberals/progressives tend to be Utopians, but Godard seems to have a strong Edenist bent to him.

Good point too about the heroes in DS being beaten down by time. In addition to the melancholic, mournful tone, perhaps another good adjective is "wearisome," that so many of the NPCs and even bosses seem incredibly weary about the world and what it's come to.
Raxivace wrote:
Eva Yojimbo wrote:I did check them out, which is how I knew I didn't get the best endings, lol. I agree that Solaire's is especially convoluted. I could see how I might've gotten it by accident since most of my first playthrough I'd join each new covenant I found. I just happened to not find the one that you have to join to take the shortcut through Demon Ruins/Izalith.
Solaire's is just weird to me because the Covenant you have to join to save him is like Chaos-based or something IIRC, which is just at odds with what Solaire stands for as a character. Like if I had to join the Sunbro covenant and farm Sunlight Medals that would be thematically coherent, but what you have to actually do is just odd.
Agreed.
Raxivace wrote:
I just wish the side quests would've been a bit more explicit. Like, Reah's is extremely obscure as well. I don't know how the player is supposed to know that Petrus is going to betray her and you should kill him first. Then, you have to NOT buy all of her miracles or else she moves on to The Duke's Archives and goes hollow anyway.
FWIW nearly every "teacher" character like that goes Hollow once you buy out their shop. But yeah the Petrus thing is odd.

That's one of the interesting things about runs where you buy every pryomancy/sorcerery/etc. in the game. You spend the first half of the game essentially building this family at Firelink and the second half of the game killing them off as you finish buying out their shops and they go Hollow. Its an interesting progression.
Another good point I hadn't considered. It's almost like the building/losing a family progression mirrors the nature of the kindling and then progressive extinguishing of the flames.
Raxivace wrote:
LOL, I never noticed that. Will have to keep in mind if I eventually do a Pyromancy build playthrough.
Yeah I didn't even know that until my Level 1 playthrough. I had juts assumed he would be resistant to pyromancy based on his name/location and tried to fight him without that until I looked him up and whelp.

He doesn't even do fire damage himself! It's magic damage! What the fuck.
I guess he's magical fire rather than actual fire? Out of curiosity, what DID you do on your L1 Pyro build against baddies/bosses that were fire resistant? I assume Queelag is?
Raxivace wrote:

I do like this video about Sekiro though which might as well be about Dark Souls.
LOL, that's hilarious. Speaking of YT vids related to Souls, have you seen the guy that reviews obscure "Souls-like" games? I like his vids as his voice has a calming effect that's kinda funny when he's playing the frustrating aspects of these typically very cheap and crappy games. He's done like 3-4 vids on them by now. Here's the first:
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Re: Rax/Maz/Jimbo 2020 Games Thread: "S.T.A.R.S...."

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Eva Yojimbo wrote:Yeah, there's indeed a "detective vision" mode in the game that you use to find/follow clues. You can also use it to basically see where baddies are during stealth sections.
Ah okay, that explains "Witcher vision" jokes and such then.
That's a good point too about Contempt foreshadowing 80s Godard's obsessions. It's almost kinda weird that such a radical progressive seems to also have this profound nostalgia for the past. Reminds me of the theory that people are either Edenists or Utopians; the Edenists think that paradise is something that was lost in the distant past, while Utopians think that paradise is something we'll find in the future. Typically, liberals/progressives tend to be Utopians, but Godard seems to have a strong Edenist bent to him.
I think part of Godard's point in the 80's at least is that film culture was starting to become a bit insular (It's even moreso now IMHO) and disconnected from other, older artistic traditions. From mythology, literature, painting etc. Like really the way he uses those classical references in the 80's movies doesn't seem that different than the way he used classical Hollywood references in the 60's, and yet I have a much easier time with the 60's movies despite the 80's references once upon a time being part of a "standard" education and such that you might have received if you were going to school alongside Shakespeare in 1570's England or whatever.

Herzog has talked about similar things too, what with his encouraging young filmmaker wannabe's to "READ! READ! READ!" and not just watch movies (Though that they should be doing that too). And even when he tells kids to read Virgil for example, its not even The Aeneid he brings up but rather the Georgics. Of course he also has modern examples of literature too, though he has other oddball examples like the official report on the Kennedy Assassination.

Honestly I think both of them have a valid point in their own weird ways. Like its easier for me to complain that when video game people bitch about someone like Kojima being too wordy and influenced by film or whatever stupid nonsense when they're not even comparing a game like MGS2 to one like Alphaville (A movie Kojima has publicly mentioned to having seen before) and instead only the most obvious action movies and such that he references, but by that same token I think you can make similar criticisms about modern cinephiles and filmmakers and even myself treating film like its disconnected from the rest of art history and the world. Like 40's Hollywood screenwriters were directly trying to adapt the trends of modernist literature for the screen when they were helping create the masterpieces of that era, but I can't imagine many filmmakers or critics or film fans being that plugged into that kind of artistic trend outside of film today.

So if anything I think if its not even that he's using classical works necessarily that makes that aspect of Godard radical, but that he's using literally anything outside of insular fanboy cinephilia points of reference.

This is part of what's inspired my recent foray into trying to read more, feeling like I was something of a massive hypocrite for criticizing others for limited frames of reference when I was and still am incredibly limited myself. I should at least make an effort to expand, probably, if I'm going to take others to task for not doing the same. Also a lot of this old stuff is generally good and interesting anyways.That's just one example of another art though; for all that me and others will moan about how film is a visual medium, I sure as fuck have no idea how to compare film to painting in any real meaningful way. We even have the example of the canonized Jean Renoir being the son of the canonized painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir, but it seems like despite being father and son the people interested in the works of them belong to two completely different worlds, with few having an interest in how the father's work may have affected the son's work, if at all.

This has gotten rambly and perhaps it really is the pretentiousness you jokingly accused me of earlier. But that nagging feeling that something is wrong about all of this is still there for me.
Good point too about the heroes in DS being beaten down by time. In addition to the melancholic, mournful tone, perhaps another good adjective is "wearisome," that so many of the NPCs and even bosses seem incredibly weary about the world and what it's come to.
Yeah. Everyone and even the world itself seems to be on its last breaths.
Another good point I hadn't considered. It's almost like the building/losing a family progression mirrors the nature of the kindling and then progressive extinguishing of the flames.
Yeah. For me it made me think of more typical JRPG's where you gradually gain party members, but not many have you just kill them off one by one like that.
I guess he's magical fire rather than actual fire? Out of curiosity, what DID you do on your L1 Pyro build against baddies/bosses that were fire resistant? I assume Queelag is?
Supposedly there's some lore explanation about the guy actually using magic but still.

For Fire resistant bosses I used Lightning Hand Axe. The Pyromancer is the only class that actually starts at Level 1 anyways, and the Hand Axe is its default weapon. The Lightning upgrade path seems to make short work of a lot of other enemies too IIRC.
Speaking of YT vids related to Souls, have you seen the guy that reviews obscure "Souls-like" games? I like his vids as his voice has a calming effect that's kinda funny when he's playing the frustrating aspects of these typically very cheap and crappy games. He's done like 3-4 vids on them by now. Here's the first:
I had not heard of this guy before.

Honestly quite a few of those games in this first vid actually look okay. I liked the aesthetic of like four of them at least.
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Re: Rax/Maz/Jimbo 2020 Games Thread: "S.T.A.R.S...."

Post by Eva Yojimbo »

Raxivace wrote:
That's a good point too about Contempt foreshadowing 80s Godard's obsessions. It's almost kinda weird that such a radical progressive seems to also have this profound nostalgia for the past. Reminds me of the theory that people are either Edenists or Utopians; the Edenists think that paradise is something that was lost in the distant past, while Utopians think that paradise is something we'll find in the future. Typically, liberals/progressives tend to be Utopians, but Godard seems to have a strong Edenist bent to him.
I think part of Godard's point in the 80's at least is that film culture was starting to become a bit insular (It's even moreso now IMHO) and disconnected from other, older artistic traditions...
That's a good way of looking at it too, though I think that also goes back to the Modernist anxiety of looking back to artistic traditions as a kind of bastion against the increasing fragmentation of the modern world. Going back to the Edenist/Utopian split though it's worth noting that many of those guys--at least certainly TS Eliot, Ezra Pound, and WH Auden--were all conservatives to an extent, so it's still kinda odd that a progressive like Godard adopted that kind of thinking too; though at least unlike Eliot and Auden he never fell into religious fundamentalism; but I think you offer a good alternative explanation as to why such tradition would be appealing to him.

Of course, it is a valuable thing to educate one's self in that tradition, if for the same reason it's good to be educated about history. Both are invaluable at giving insights into the aspects of life and humanity that endure over time, as well as the aspects that change and evolve. Plus, there's always tons of great ideas in that history and tradition that great artists can make great use of today. It's not accidental that the 20th century novel really got started with Joyce's Ulysses, which looked back to the oldest narrative tradition of all while adapting it to contemporary life and language. Contempt was very much Godard's take on that extended dialogue between the past/tradition and the present too. I also think the more you explore tradition the more you see these themes, motifs, ideas, etc. everywhere so it gives you such a broader base for comparison and to understand what's genuinely new/innovative and what's just borrowed from other sources.

All that said, I do understand why different mediums become insular, because even though some ideas and themes can carry over the particular expression of them doesn't; so the way film expresses themes, or at least makes them felt, is very different than how literature or music or painting does it. Of course there are similarities too, but any adaptation requires consideration of the new medium if you have any hope of making the new work a masterpiece in its own right. So mediums become insular in large part because artists are, in large part, concerned about the craft of their chosen medium, and any inspiration they get from other mediums, although they can certainly be extremely valuable and even profound, must ultimately be filtered through the craft of their own medium. I actually think Godard and Tarantino make for a good comparison here, because while both are superb cinematic craftsman that often employ similar techniques in their craft, the major difference between them is their breadth and depth of inspiration. Tarantino comes across as someone who's entire education comes from film, while Godard is difficult precisely because he does not, and it's a challenge to grasp all of the references and sources he's drawing from, which ultimately makes him a much deeper artist too.
Raxivace wrote:This has gotten rambly and perhaps it really is the pretentiousness you jokingly accused me of earlier. But that nagging feeling that something is wrong about all of this is still there for me.
LOL, dude I'm the OG king of rambling pretentiousness. The joke was precisely that I was accusing you of what I do 10x worse. I'm the last person you should ever apologize for being rambling and pretentious.
Raxivace wrote:
Good point too about the heroes in DS being beaten down by time. In addition to the melancholic, mournful tone, perhaps another good adjective is "wearisome," that so many of the NPCs and even bosses seem incredibly weary about the world and what it's come to.
Yeah. Everyone and even the world itself seems to be on its last breaths.
Another sad, hidden little gem in the game I just found out about is that apparently if you beat Artorias and save Sif in the Abyss before beating the Sif guarding Artorias's tomb that there's an alternative cutscene where Sif will smell you and recognize you as his savior before starting the fight. It's emotional stuff like that the game does extremely well despite never having any real dialogue to tell the player exactly what's going on, just doing it all through tone and suggestion. Of course, it's possible to learn about the lore afterwards, but I think the fact that the game is so good at communicating the feelings behind the lore without explicitly going into the lore itself is quite remarkable. Can't think of any games that have ever really done anything similar, other than maybe Shadow of the Colossus.
Raxivace wrote:
I guess he's magical fire rather than actual fire? Out of curiosity, what DID you do on your L1 Pyro build against baddies/bosses that were fire resistant? I assume Queelag is?
Supposedly there's some lore explanation about the guy actually using magic but still.

For Fire resistant bosses I used Lightning Hand Axe. The Pyromancer is the only class that actually starts at Level 1 anyways, and the Hand Axe is its default weapon. The Lightning upgrade path seems to make short work of a lot of other enemies too IIRC.
Exactly how hard was the L1 run? I might try it myself some time if it's not too maddening.
Raxivace wrote:
Speaking of YT vids related to Souls, have you seen the guy that reviews obscure "Souls-like" games? I like his vids as his voice has a calming effect that's kinda funny when he's playing the frustrating aspects of these typically very cheap and crappy games. He's done like 3-4 vids on them by now. Here's the first:
I had not heard of this guy before.

Honestly quite a few of those games in this first vid actually look okay. I liked the aesthetic of like four of them at least.
There's definitely some gems in there too. I like the one (can't remember from which video) where you play as a little witch girl. Seemed like a really cutesy/chibi take on the genre but the design and mechanics looked pretty awesome. I think it was only available as a demo though. It also doesn't get more LOL-worthy than the first game's "killed by life's circumstances."

EDIT: Found the witch one. It's the first game from this vid:
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Re: Rax/Maz/Jimbo 2020 Games Thread: "S.T.A.R.S...."

Post by Raxivace »

Eva Yojimbo wrote:Of course, it is a valuable thing to educate one's self in that tradition, if for the same reason it's good to be educated about history. Both are invaluable at giving insights into the aspects of life and humanity that endure over time, as well as the aspects that change and evolve. Plus, there's always tons of great ideas in that history and tradition that great artists can make great use of today. It's not accidental that the 20th century novel really got started with Joyce's Ulysses, which looked back to the oldest narrative tradition of all while adapting it to contemporary life and language. Contempt was very much Godard's take on that extended dialogue between the past/tradition and the present too. I also think the more you explore tradition the more you see these themes, motifs, ideas, etc. everywhere so it gives you such a broader base for comparison and to understand what's genuinely new/innovative and what's just borrowed from other sources.
Agree with all of this. Its really a version of that more abstract point in your last sentence of that paragraph that I'm trying to make here.
All that said, I do understand why different mediums become insular, because even though some ideas and themes can carry over the particular expression of them doesn't; so the way film expresses themes, or at least makes them felt, is very different than how literature or music or painting does it. Of course there are similarities too, but any adaptation requires consideration of the new medium if you have any hope of making the new work a masterpiece in its own right. So mediums become insular in large part because artists are, in large part, concerned about the craft of their chosen medium, and any inspiration they get from other mediums, although they can certainly be extremely valuable and even profound, must ultimately be filtered through the craft of their own medium. I actually think Godard and Tarantino make for a good comparison here, because while both are superb cinematic craftsman that often employ similar techniques in their craft, the major difference between them is their breadth and depth of inspiration. Tarantino comes across as someone who's entire education comes from film, while Godard is difficult precisely because he does not, and it's a challenge to grasp all of the references and sources he's drawing from, which ultimately makes him a much deeper artist too.
Yeah, Tarantino is an interesting example because while he only draws from film history he at least knows it really god damned well and is arguably the best at that hyper-pastiche style. Still, I agree its inherently limited and few are even going to come close to matching the level of film knowledge that Tarantino possesses to begin with. How many of the Tarantino knockoffs have been successful?

Like I love film, I love film history, I champion the great directors of the past. I do think there's a related problem in "cinephiles" not even knowing their film history well* (Did you see that blowup recently about the critic comparing Last of Us II to Schindler's List? That dude is also a film critic on a podcast I used to listen to and one of the reasons I stopped listening to it a few years back was because he was a total moron there who didn't seem to have much film knowledge going further back than like, 1990), but hyper-recycling the same few influences will be an evolutionary creative deadend in its own right.

Having a deeper pool of influence like Godard (Or even like the 40's Hollywood screenwriters example like I mentioned) is harder but necessary for a healthy film culture IMO.

EDIT: *Thinking about this some more, there was recent online controversy about Spike Lee and Da 5 Bloods, about how critics apparently often missed obvious allusions in D5B to films like Treasure of the Sierra Madre (Or if they noticed them, they apparently had nothing to say about them), and I don't think that started with that film either. Like even for all that's been written about Do the Right Thing, I don't think I've yet read a convincing explanation as to why the Radio Raheem character is so heavily connected intertextually to the Rev. Harry Powell character from The Night of the Hunter despite being maybe one of the strangest allusions in all of film history. Of course, people would have to actually see Night of the Hunter first, or Treasure of the Sierra Madre and so on.
LOL, dude I'm the OG king of rambling pretentiousness. The joke was precisely that I was accusing you of what I do 10x worse. I'm the last person you should ever apologize for being rambling and pretentious.
I mean I understood the joke, but the edge of truth to it still cuts a bit.
Another sad, hidden little gem in the game I just found out about is that apparently if you beat Artorias and save Sif in the Abyss before beating the Sif guarding Artorias's tomb that there's an alternative cutscene where Sif will smell you and recognize you as his savior before starting the fight. It's emotional stuff like that the game does extremely well despite never having any real dialogue to tell the player exactly what's going on, just doing it all through tone and suggestion. Of course, it's possible to learn about the lore afterwards, but I think the fact that the game is so good at communicating the feelings behind the lore without explicitly going into the lore itself is quite remarkable. Can't think of any games that have ever really done anything similar, other than maybe Shadow of the Colossus.
Yeah that's another example of a really strong bit of character writing in the game. One of the rare examples of the game actually going for something resembling like, present-tense drama.

Yeah I'm fairly certain SotC influenced Dark Souls. That's why I even had you play it first last year!
Exactly how hard was the L1 run? I might try it myself some time if it's not too maddening.
For the most part its not too bad (At least on regular New Game runs) with the Pyromancy stuff I mentioned, but I had trouble with Manus and Kalameet even with summoned help. I seem to remember 4 Kings being a bit tough too.

The biggest problem with Level 1 Dark Souls runs is that it seems like they're just not nearly as much variety in gameplay as regular runs.
"killed by life's circumstances."
That's going on my tombstone btw.
EDIT: Found the witch one. It's the first game from this vid:
Yeah that witch one (I'm guessing magical girl anime is what's they're influenced by) actually looks really cool. I'd honestly consider buying a full version of that game, though hopefully they'd improve the translation a bit.
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Re: Rax/Maz/Jimbo 2020 Games Thread: "S.T.A.R.S...."

Post by Eva Yojimbo »

Will try to catch up tomorrow but I'll drop this review for now:

Image

Batman: Arkham Asylum - 6/10 (or; How a Game That Totally Ripped it Off Ten Years Later is Shockingly Much Better).

This was a tough game to rate, because its biggest flaws come entirely from it being an originator of ideas that have had 10+ years of refinement. When people said this was the archetype for PS4 Spider-Man, they weren't kidding. Other than the open-world design of the latter (and I've heard the second Batman: Arkham game went open-world too), pretty much every other gameplay mechanic and device was taken directly from here. The problem for B:AA is that Spider-Man also did most all of them better.

Let's start with the combat, which is relatively simple to start--your options are attack, counter, dodge, cape stun, or batarang stun--but gets a bit more complex as you unlock combat moves with XP. It's also quite fun if only for the challenge of building up combos in an unbreakable flow for as long as possible without getting hit. After about hit 10 you'll start to feel invincible and will develop super moves that'll knock guys out with one hit. That said, there are some problems. One is the "shaky-cam" device they use that, while certainly cool/cinematic looking, also makes targeting your next enemy with the joystick rather annoying. Another is the fact that it's difficult to time button presses as the game loves to enter slow-mo at certain points and really breaks up the rhythm of the hits. I'm sure someone who spent a lot of time practicing the game's combat could overcome both of these, but on an initial playthrough it's not nearly as smooth and intuitive as it should be, certainly not compared to Spider-Man. The final problem with the combat is that, in the actual game itself, there is surprisingly little of it. Most of it is saved for "boss" fights and the occasional ambush.

In between the sparse combat there will be stealth sections where the idea is to swing from always strategically-spaced gargoyles to take down armed enemies on patrol. Again, Spider-Man had a similar concept, but did it much better if only because of the variety. While there is technically a variety of ways to stealth enemies in Batman, from nabbing them as they walk under statues, to sneaking up behind them, to using detonator gel to set traps, to swooping in with glide kicks... I found most sections were easiest by just hanging out and waiting until one baddie was in isolation enough to take them down with whatever method had access to them; lather, rinse, repeat. Perhaps this is was mostly just due to my lack of imagination, but every time I tried other methods (mostly out of boredom) I'd get killed.

Beyond the stealth and combat there's also tons of extras to find hidden around the map, mostly in the form of Riddler Trophies (usually only accessible once you unlock new gadgets), actual riddles (which are solved by taking a "picture" of the thing/area being described), hidden question marks, psychiatric recordings of various villains, and finally "Spirit of Arkham" markers that will tell something of a story-within-a-story. Really, I'd say the majority of my playtime wasn't taken up with combat or stealth, but on hunting down all these extras. Some were annoyingly well hidden, but given there's 240 of them I only had to check a guide maybe a dozen-or-so times. The rewards for finding them was mostly in the form of character trophies and new "challenge" modes.

Speaking of which, the challenge modes turned out in some ways to be funner than the actual game. Most of them unsurprisingly centered around combat and stealth, and I ended up only finding the former worthwhile. Some were simply a challenge of surviving as long as you can, but I found the ones in which you were scored across several rounds taking on multiple baddies the funnest. The ideal in those is to beat them in a single combo, without getting hit, and with as much variety as possible. The one I played most I spent a good solid 3-4 hours just to get all three "rewards" (which required a score over 20,000). Thinking I did good, I checked the online leaderboard to see the top score was like 240,000. Like, WTF? I have no idea how that's even possible or how people get so good at these games... but I digress. Again, the challenge and collectible idea was something Spider-Man copied, though this is one area where it didn't improve much on B:AA's template. If anything, the collectibles in SM were way too easy to find, though I did appreciate that the challenges were made into side-quests within the actual game rather than a separate, out-of-game mode.

Probably the game's strongest aspect is its style/aesthetic and just how well it nails the tone and feel of the Batman mythos. As I said earlier, its main inspiration is the Animated Series and that's a great thing because I still feel it's the best Batman iteration of all time. The game takes the series' designs but adds a bit more realism to it so it's slightly less cartoonish TAS (downside being it loses TAS's distinctive "Dark Deco" combination of noir and Art Deco). I did, however, find the exteriors more inspired than the interiors. The map design has a quasi Metroidvania aspect to it with its interconnections (multiple buildings are connected with the North/East/West exteriors as well as a sewer and cave system), but the game ended up being surprisingly linear basically defeating the whole point of the design, only opening up towards the end once you have all the gadgets necessary to traverse certain areas.

Story-wise, the game is pretty minimal. Joker takes over Arkham Asylum, all hell (and all prisoners) break loose, and Batman has to fix the mess. That's really all there is to it. There's probably more story told from the Spirit of Arkham recordings and the various recordings of other villains than in the game's actual story. It's hard to complain too much when you get consistently treated to Hammill's supreme Joker, who's constantly chiming in over the Asylum's PA system, but it does feel like a lost opportunity. Perhaps the best "story" aspects were the "nightmare" sections in which The Scarecrow's gas causes Batman to hallucinate, turning the game into a 2D platformer in which you must hide from Scarecrow's gaze (though other sections has you walking past the scene in which Bruce's parents were murdered). These were undoubtedly the game's most inspired sections, at time feeling like a cross of David Lynch and MGS2's trippiest, metafictional aspects. This is another bit Spider-Man stole from here, though this is a rare instance where B:AA's execution was far better.

The boss battles join the story in being disappointing. The game essentially recycles the same "Titan" bosses about half-a-dozen times with slight variations (now Titan boss VS regular baddies, now two titan bosses). The only exception to this is the Killer Croc section, a Poison Ivy battle and the final Joker-Titan battle, though none of these were particularly innovative or memorable (Poison Ivy's stands out as probably the best; even having a slightly old-school shooter vibe to it in some respects).

I feel like if I had played this game back in '09 it would've been an easy 8/10. Ten years later it comes off mostly as an extremely innovative but rough incarnation of a game-design approach that will be bettered by subsequent games; but it still has me very interested to see what the series could do with these concepts in an open world.
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Re: Rax/Maz/Jimbo 2020 Games Thread: "S.T.A.R.S...."

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Eva Yojimbo wrote:Batman: Arkham Asylum - 6/10 (or; How a Game That Totally Ripped it Off Ten Years Later is Shockingly Much Better).
Good review. While I haven't played this one, it does make me wonder just how much I'll like Spider-Man PS4 when I get around to it, because while I'll probably like it at least a bit, having played previous Spider-Man games from the N64/GameCube/Xbox 360 eras does make me wonder if it will "wow" me or just be like "Yeah this is just a fairly natural progression of what I played when I was younger". Like even back on the GameCube there were open world Spider-Man games.

Generally I wouldn't hold it against Batman being worse than the games that it inspired, though even at the time I'm sure your Devil May Crys and the like probably had better combat systems.
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Re: Rax/Maz/Jimbo 2020 Games Thread: "S.T.A.R.S...."

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Fallout 3 (2008) - So I had actually first tried this when it was fairly new, but it didn't click with me. It always kind of bothered me that I never at least finished it before, so seeing it cheap in a sale a few weeks ago I decided to pick it up and try it again. Honestly I still thinks its fairly bad- maybe its not quite as bad as I remembered it being but even hardcore Fallout fans seem to not have much positive to say about this anymore either. I dunno how much of that is fans of the older Fallout games from Bethesda bought the property just hating change and I dunno how much of that is later Fallout games simply doing what this was trying to do but better.

Either way I'm glad to knock this one off the backlog. Basically its another open-world WRPG. The basic story here is that America is bombed to hell by nukes or something, and part of humanity has been living in underground "Vaults" for the time being. Your create-a-character and their dad, Liam Neeson are citizens of one of these Vaults. Liam Neeson escapes into the surface world (Where there actually are humans still actually living in the ruins of Washington D.C.. In addition to normal humans just trying to eke out a living, there are also "raiders" and "super mutants" and such enemies like that). You then escape the Vault yourself and chase Liam Neeson to find out wtf is going on- apparently he's a scientist trying to purify irradiated water, and knew the whole "Vault" system was something of a sham this whole time as an excuse to experiment on citizens. So when you finally catch up to him you help build a giant water purifier but an evil government remnant or some nonsense kills Liam Neeson so they can be the ones to uh, purify the water. Really I'm not sure why its supposed to be so bad who purifies the fucking water exactly. Like both sides want the same thing.

You can also play an evil character and poison the water yourself to genocide all mutants (Not all of them are violent, a lot of them are peaceful), but that's like cartoonishly evil for a game that tries to play up "ambiguous moral choices" and such. You're either a saint or the world's evilest dude or dudette.

Honestly like none of the writing in the main quest or any of the sidequests really landed for me here. Like its cool that a lot of the sidequests have multiple ways to clear them, but the writing as a result has to be broad enough to allow for several different possibilities and that kind of makes almost none of it interesting as a result.

Even aesthetically this game starts feeling really samey really fast. Almost everything in this game is "bombed out ruin with 50's architecture and aesthetics" or "destroyed American historical site" which just makes the look boring for how long the game is.

The part of the game I like the most is probably the in-game radio station, "Galaxy News Radio". It's a combination of a disc jockey commenting on what you've actually done in the story (I.e. you play as a nice guy he says nice things about you, you do bad things he calls you an asshole), and play a combination of actually existing pop songs from the 50's and before, pastiches created for the game, and fictionalized radio dramas.

The actual combat is typical shooter stuff (Which you can do in either first person or third person), though there's a mode called "V.A.T.S." that allows you temporarily freeze time, select a body part of an enemy, and fire. It's kind of similar to ATB in Final Fantasy games, really.

You also have stats like "Speech" and "Lockpicking" and such you can use to bypass certain aspects of the (Such as breaking into a safe, talking down a violent NPC or whatever), but none of it is particularly thrilling stuff. You also can get passive abilities through clearing quests in certain ways or just leveling up, but most of them aren't too interesting, as from what I can tell most them just seem to increase your stats in some fashion.

Honestly, most damning thing I can say about Fallout 3 is that there's not too much that's particularly strong here, which is worse than just having bad parts and aspects. Even things I kind of like about the base game all seem like they were done better in BioShock which came out the year before anyways. Better "ruins with retro-aesthetic and old pop songs" thing going on, better shooting, more unique level design in general etc. Like, unless you have an open world fetish I can't think of anything Fallout 3 does that BioShock isn't doing better.

I should mention I haven't played any of the DLC's for Fallout 3 yet though. Those might have decent stories at least- look forward to me talking about them eventually.

Oh yeah, there's a heavy modding community for this game (Or there was anyways), and honestly Fallout 3 seems like its at its best when you don't treat as like, a work of art or anything but instead as just a toybox. Like removing the weight limit, allowing infinite partners, modding in the Swan Station from Lost etc. may not make the game better per se, but at least its more enjoyable to just roam around with a cadre full of people and just decimate guys.

It seems later Bethesda games actually have even more involved modding which might lead me to actually playing those in the future. Like I already was sort of curious about Fallout: New Vegas since critics of Fallout 3 point to that game as an example of much better writing, though it looks like Skyrim has mods to allow you to have a party of Geralt of Rivia, 2B, and Saber which is like extremely up my specific alley. Now if only the PC version would go on sale, and also nobody tell Maz because I'm sure he'll make fun of me for not listening to him earlier when he told me to play this.

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Melty Blood (2002)
Melty Blood Re-ACT: Final Tuned (2005)
Melty Blood: Act Cadenza Ver.B (2007)
Melty Blood: Actress Again Current Code (2010) - The followups to Tsukihime and Kagetsu Tohya, finally ending the series (Until the Tsukhime Remake anyways and the inevitable collaborative event in Fate/Grand Order. It's only been like 12 years since it was first announced, it'll happen any day now).

These are 2D fighting games in the style of what Capcom and the like we're doing at the time (I was unsure how you do fighting game sequel to a story where the main character had terrible anemia but here we are). Visually, the 2D sprites still start out pretty good from an indie game from 2002 and as the games went on, the sprites themselves got more and more work put into them, so by time you get to Actress Again Current Code the game's sprites and animations are just a delight to look at.

The gameplay is honestly super solid too, and similarly only got better as time went on. You have a variety of special attacks, a super meter, double jumps, grabs etc. While I'm not an expect on these 2D fighters its just really, really fun to pick up and play and honestly on par with the better games from Capcom and SNK and the like. Gameplay-wise, Actress Again Current Code was seemed to be the best though as it had the biggest roster AND each character had three different styles of gameplay to choose from, which is cool (IIRC Marvel vs. Capcom 2 did something similar). Actress Again Current Code shockingly enough even got a Steam release, though the localization seems kind of half-assed. It was also these four games for me to get actually running, since anytime I tried running the game though Steam it just wouldn't detect my PS4 controller, but if I clicked the executable file directly I wouldn't have any issues. Weird.

So, the story. First off I should mention "Melty Blood" and "Melty Blood Re-Act: Final Tuned" are the same game in that aspect, though the latter is just a version of the former with some touched sprites, gameplay mechanics, and added characters (Think Street Fighter II and the jokes about its million revisions). The actual story mode combines visual novel story telling and the fighting game part. You read read read for a while, but when you get to what would be a regular action scene in a regular visual novel, you switch to the fighting.

These fighting portions are where the actual story branches come in. Some routes require you to win the fight, but even losing a lot of fights doesn't end the game but simply puts you onto a different story route.

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It's more a proof of concept though that later games like BlazBlue would later lift from, as the chart above shows that there's not really that many routes here. It's also not the nightmare that the Kagetsu Tohya flowchart is. Similar to Kagetsu Tohya, the storytelling mechanisms are more interesting than the story itself is, with a new vampire jackass flowing into town, and new important girl Sion coming in to hunt him (Teaming up with Tohno Shiki to do so) and hopefully cure her own vampirism in the process. Its pretty basic, but the format itself is intriguing.

These first games also have an arcade mode of their own, and most of them revolve around your chosen character going to fight a completely different antagonist instead of the one from the proper story mode, which is interesting. This seems more in line with the story modes of regular fighting games to me.

Act Cadenza Ver.B drops the visual novel part unfortunately, and while its arcade modes seem to follow up on the ones from Melty Blood 1/ReACT Final Tuned, its still ultimately the same villain from the arcade mode of those games.

Actress Again Current Code again only has the arcade modes in terms of story, though they bring in a new villain for most part ("Dust of Osiris", a version of Sion from alternate future where she becomes, uh, an Egyptian pharaoh or goddess or something, who is also a computer? Sion is not even from Egypt originally, she only goes to school there). Actress Again Current Code is also at least willing to shake the arcade modes up a bit- like for example, Archetype Earth's arcade mode plays out fairly normally for these kinds of things for the most part, until the ending where the final boss isn't Dust of Osiris, but it instead ends up being Archetype Earth and you play as a completely separate character for the final match that's trying to stop her. I appreciate that.

I'm kind of bummed to be done with the Tsukihime game series now, its been fun to go through even if I still have a bit of the Fate games left.

"But Raxivace, you could watch the Tsukhime anime adaptation!"

Liar, there is no Tsukihime anime.

"But its true! I googled it! It came out in 2003 and-"

NO YOU DIDN'T GOOGLE IT. YOU CAN'T GOOGLE THINGS THAT ARE NOT REAL AND DON'T EVEN EXIST. NOW SHUT UP.
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Re: Rax/Maz/Jimbo 2020 Games Thread: "S.T.A.R.S...."

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Oh yeah one last thing to say about mods and Fallout 3 is that I flatout needed mods to get it to even run on my modern laptop, and even with stability mods it still crashed constantly and locked up constantly (To the point separate mods already exist to force-exit from the game when it gets frozen up for too long), so LOL Bethesda. This is a game you can still buy right now on Steam for Christ's sake.
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Re: Rax/Maz/Jimbo 2020 Games Thread: "S.T.A.R.S...."

Post by Eva Yojimbo »

Raxivace wrote:Yeah, Tarantino is an interesting example because while he only draws from film history he at least knows it really god damned well and is arguably the best at that hyper-pastiche style. Still, I agree its inherently limited and few are even going to come close to matching the level of film knowledge that Tarantino possesses to begin with. How many of the Tarantino knockoffs have been successful?
Being able to do pastiches the way Tarantino does is certainly a skill in itself. It's one thing to have the extensive experience with film history in order to even be aware of all those styles, and it's another thing to know enough about filmmaking to be able to replicate those styles, and it's yet another thing to be creative enough to think about meshing dozens of disparate styles together and somehow making it work, so it's no slight on people that are able to do that and Tarantino is arguably the best.
Raxivace wrote:Like I love film, I love film history, I champion the great directors of the past. I do think there's a related problem in "cinephiles" not even knowing their film history well* (Did you see that blowup recently about the critic comparing Last of Us II to Schindler's List? That dude is also a film critic on a podcast I used to listen to and one of the reasons I stopped listening to it a few years back was because he was a total moron there who didn't seem to have much film knowledge going further back than like, 1990), but hyper-recycling the same few influences will be an evolutionary creative deadend in its own right.

Having a deeper pool of influence like Godard (Or even like the 40's Hollywood screenwriters example like I mentioned) is harder but necessary for a healthy film culture IMO.
There's an even worse problem with music fans. At the very least I can say that I've been apart of several film-related message boards where there were people interested in foreign films, old films, etc., and there were at least a few that was quite knowledgeable about those things... but it's been uncommon on any music forums for people to be aware of much (if any) music before they were born. It's also far more insular, where even if you get people interested in older music it's generally only music of one genre. There's actually been studies that show that most people's music tastes are stuck at whatever they heard/liked at 14, which is pretty depressing.

Anyway, I digress, but no I haven't heard of blowup about TLOU2/Schindler's List thing. You got a link? I'm not sure if hyper-recycling is necessarily a dead end because there's always more films out there to discover and add to the blender. The bigger issue is probably complacency and falling back on the same influences, in not being motivated to discover new stuff with the same passion you did in your youth before the business of actually making films took over. Tarantino already started doing that (recycling influences I mean) by at least Django and Hateful Eight. So that's definitely where I think having a deeper/broader pool of influences helps, in avoiding stagnation and repetition.
Raxivace wrote:EDIT: *Thinking about this some more, there was recent online controversy about Spike Lee and Da 5 Bloods, about how critics apparently often missed obvious allusions in D5B to films like Treasure of the Sierra Madre (Or if they noticed them, they apparently had nothing to say about them), and I don't think that started with that film either. Like even for all that's been written about Do the Right Thing, I don't think I've yet read a convincing explanation as to why the Radio Raheem character is so heavily connected intertextually to the Rev. Harry Powell character from The Night of the Hunter despite being maybe one of the strangest allusions in all of film history. Of course, people would have to actually see Night of the Hunter first, or Treasure of the Sierra Madre and so on.
Not only would they had to have seen those films, but they'd have to be able to make the connection, and that's not easy either. I don't remember if I'd seen NotH or TotSM before DTRT, but I have (at least) seen them since and I didn't make those intertextual connections. That's one reason film criticism is useful because even when you don't make those connections, if they exist then there's a good chance someone out there has. But, yeah, can't make those connections at all if you're unaware of those films to begin with.
Raxivace wrote:
LOL, dude I'm the OG king of rambling pretentiousness. The joke was precisely that I was accusing you of what I do 10x worse. I'm the last person you should ever apologize for being rambling and pretentious.
I mean I understood the joke, but the edge of truth to it still cuts a bit.
Eh, there's no real edge of truth to it beyond the fact that I think we're both hyper-sensitive about being pretentious. The flip-side of the Dunning-Kruger effect that people seem to forget is that actually competent people underrate their abilities/knowledge and tend to think that most (or a lot of) people know as much/more than they do. I think it comes with an awareness of how much is out there and how much one hasn't experienced, rather than ever stopping to think just how much you actually know and have experienced. I mean, there's only so many hours in a day to experience and learn new stuff, and even if one devotes every waking hour to doing so we're all going to be limited by memory anyway.

Plus, as long as we're always willing to learn and be corrected when/if wrong there's nothing pretentious about analyzing or discussing about what we do know or even what we think might be the case. I also learned a long time ago that the vast majority of people who use "pretentious" as a criticism against people are just insecure about their own lack of knowledge/understanding and prefer to criticize anything that's beyond that so as to shift the responsibility away from them actually needing to learn or improve themselves. There was an old thread on EGF where I actually suggested just "owning" the label of pretentious, like the way black people came to own the n-word, or women came to own the word "bitch." It takes the sting away.
Raxivace wrote:Yeah I'm fairly certain SotC influenced Dark Souls. That's why I even had you play it first last year!
Definitely a possibility. I also learned from reading the DS companion (saying "I learned from reading You Died" sounds bizarre, though that's what it's called!) that Miyazaki also took influence from Arthurian legend, Nibelungen, and something else that I'm forgetting. Makes sense in retrospect given the game's frequently archaic speech and the feeling of ancient-ness about it all. Plus the whole archetypal stuff we talked about.
Raxivace wrote:
Eva Yojimbo wrote:Batman: Arkham Asylum - 6/10 (or; How a Game That Totally Ripped it Off Ten Years Later is Shockingly Much Better).
Good review. While I haven't played this one, it does make me wonder just how much I'll like Spider-Man PS4 when I get around to it, because while I'll probably like it at least a bit, having played previous Spider-Man games from the N64/GameCube/Xbox 360 eras does make me wonder if it will "wow" me or just be like "Yeah this is just a fairly natural progression of what I played when I was younger". Like even back on the GameCube there were open world Spider-Man games.

Generally I wouldn't hold it against Batman being worse than the games that it inspired, though even at the time I'm sure your Devil May Crys and the like probably had better combat systems.
Thanks. No idea how you'll feel about Spider-Man. I'm sure my enthusiasm had multiple contextual factors: one being I had never played a decent SM game, another being I hadn't played video games in so long in general, and the last was that I've always been a Spider-Fan anyway. I will say that of all the new games I've played it still had the funnest, smoothest combat I've tried, and probably the best story besides TLOU. Of course, story is still very comic book-y, but I'd say it was done better than all of the SM films for context. There were also some annoyances with the various side-stuff being meh, but unlike with B:AA I don't remember them taking up nearly as much time.

FWIW, there's a really good core combat system happening in B:AA that I think could just use with a few tweaks, or even just me getting better at it and more used to how it's supposed to flow.
Raxivace wrote: Fallout 3 (2008) -

Melty Blood (2002)
Melty Blood Re-ACT: Final Tuned (2005)
Melty Blood: Act Cadenza Ver.B (2007)
Melty Blood: Actress Again Current Code (2010) -
Good reviews on these too. Fallout is definitely on my list of games I want to play, though I always want to start with the first one even knowing that often the sequels are completely different and often much better (though I guess they can sometimes be much worse too). Never heard of Melty Blood, but I love the title! I really need to get around to playing a fighter. They were probably the genre of games I played most as a kid (if only because it was the most common genre I played with friends), but I think part of me worries my reflexes have gotten to slow to be much good at them these days. Even back in the day there were often bosses on fighters that were incredibly hard to beat, and I'm not sure if I have the patience anymore.

BTW, I did pick up some more games with the PSN Summer Sale:

-REmake 3
-The Outer Worlds
-Greedfall
-Need for Speed, NFS Rivals and NFS Payback
-Control
-Code Vein
-Shenmue 3
-Ni No Kuni 2

BTW, this is tangential, but have you heard of/played YU-NO? Apparently it was a pretty big influence on the Fate/Stay Night series, and they recently released a remake for PS4.
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Re: Rax/Maz/Jimbo 2020 Games Thread: "S.T.A.R.S...."

Post by Raxivace »

Eva Yojimbo wrote:so it's no slight on people that are able to do that and Tarantino is arguably the best.
Yeah its incredibly difficult in its own right. Leone is maybe another example of someone who did it well, and he was a huge influence on Tarantino anyways.
There's an even worse problem with music fans. At the very least I can say that I've been apart of several film-related message boards where there were people interested in foreign films, old films, etc., and there were at least a few that was quite knowledgeable about those things... but it's been uncommon on any music forums for people to be aware of much (if any) music before they were born. It's also far more insular, where even if you get people interested in older music it's generally only music of one genre. There's actually been studies that show that most people's music tastes are stuck at whatever they heard/liked at 14, which is pretty depressing.
Honestly most of the music I like now is what I liked at 14, so I'm not one to talk here. You'll never take my light jazz elevator music away from me!! Especially whenever I'm reading an old hard-boiled detective novel and want something on in the background!!!!
Anyway, I digress, but no I haven't heard of blowup about TLOU2/Schindler's List thing. You got a link?
https://twitter.com/jeffcannata/status/ ... 4246349825

Like its clear he's using Schindler's List as an example of a film that isn't merely escapist entertainment (Though even then, this comparison is still fairly flawed. Like even with the first part of the statement I wish most games were as good at being games as John Wick was as good at being an action movie), but man somebody that's been a professional critic for at least a decade IIRC should have freaking known that people were going to read that as comparing The Last of Us II to the horrors of the actual Holocaust. Know your audience for god's sake.
I'm not sure if hyper-recycling is necessarily a dead end because there's always more films out there to discover and add to the blender. The bigger issue is probably complacency and falling back on the same influences, in not being motivated to discover new stuff with the same passion you did in your youth before the business of actually making films took over. Tarantino already started doing that (recycling influences I mean) by at least Django and Hateful Eight. So that's definitely where I think having a deeper/broader pool of influences helps, in avoiding stagnation and repetition.
I agree with the gist of this, even if I personally loved Django Unchained and Hateful Eight.

I was going to make a point about someone like Spielberg and how people out there are still making homages to him even while he's still working, but then I remembered that a show like Stranger Things didn't just reference Spielberg a ton. Like the showrunners of that even openly admitted to also taking heavy influence from Elfen Lied of all things, to the point the first season of that show is basically a loose remake. [laugh]
Not only would they had to have seen those films, but they'd have to be able to make the connection, and that's not easy either. I don't remember if I'd seen NotH or TotSM before DTRT, but I have (at least) seen them since and I didn't make those intertextual connections. That's one reason film criticism is useful because even when you don't make those connections, if they exist then there's a good chance someone out there has. But, yeah, can't make those connections at all if you're unaware of those films to begin with.
Yeah, I don't expect everyone to be able to generate every possible take about a work of art on their own, but a collective failure to address things does make me take pause.
Eh, there's no real edge of truth to it beyond the fact that I think we're both hyper-sensitive about being pretentious. The flip-side of the Dunning-Kruger effect that people seem to forget is that actually competent people underrate their abilities/knowledge and tend to think that most (or a lot of) people know as much/more than they do. I think it comes with an awareness of how much is out there and how much one hasn't experienced, rather than ever stopping to think just how much you actually know and have experienced. I mean, there's only so many hours in a day to experience and learn new stuff, and even if one devotes every waking hour to doing so we're all going to be limited by memory anyway.
Any time I've wondered if I've underrated my own knowledge its just made me think that I'm just being narcissistic in a convoluted way, and therefore Dunning-Krugering myself in the ultimate act of intellectual masturbation.

Maybe I need to take a break from the internet again lol.
Plus, as long as we're always willing to learn and be corrected when/if wrong there's nothing pretentious about analyzing or discussing about what we do know or even what we think might be the case. I also learned a long time ago that the vast majority of people who use "pretentious" as a criticism against people are just insecure about their own lack of knowledge/understanding and prefer to criticize anything that's beyond that so as to shift the responsibility away from them actually needing to learn or improve themselves. There was an old thread on EGF where I actually suggested just "owning" the label of pretentious, like the way black people came to own the n-word, or women came to own the word "bitch." It takes the sting away.
Well I'm not quite sure its on the scale of either of those two words, but I see what you mean.
Definitely a possibility. I also learned from reading the DS companion (saying "I learned from reading You Died" sounds bizarre, though that's what it's called!) that Miyazaki also took influence from Arthurian legend, Nibelungen, and something else that I'm forgetting. Makes sense in retrospect given the game's frequently archaic speech and the feeling of ancient-ness about it all. Plus the whole archetypal stuff we talked about.
Interesting. While I've been going through a lot of the Arthurian stuff after playing Fate, I did pick up a copy of the Nibelunglied btw, and the sequel to it that apparently exists called the Klage.

I should probably pick up the Volsung stuff at some point too, so I can see the differences between the "Siegfried" versions of that story and the "Sigurd" versions of that story.
Good reviews on these too. Fallout is definitely on my list of games I want to play, though I always want to start with the first one even knowing that often the sequels are completely different and often much better (though I guess they can sometimes be much worse too).
I might go and do Fallout 1 and 2 one of these days, but I dunno. The drive has never really been there for me.

What are you playing next, btw?
Never heard of Melty Blood, but I love the title!
Honestly I've been trying to puzzle out the title. Like the "Blood" part probably comes from vampires being heavily involved in the story, but the "Melty" part confounds me. Maybe its a very weird way of saying something like "Spill"?

Super Engrish-y at any rate, just like most of these titles to these Type-Moon games. When "Fate/hollow ataraxia" is one of the most sensible names to a game from a company, you just know shit is strange. [laugh]
I really need to get around to playing a fighter. They were probably the genre of games I played most as a kid (if only because it was the most common genre I played with friends), but I think part of me worries my reflexes have gotten to slow to be much good at them these days. Even back in the day there were often bosses on fighters that were incredibly hard to beat, and I'm not sure if I have the patience anymore.
I'm still terrible at these games myself and often put them on the easiest settings possible. Still, when they're fun and flashy I have a good time.
BTW, I did pick up some more games with the PSN Summer Sale:
REmake 3 and Shenmue III are the only ones of that bunch I've played. As I said in my reviews of them, I had mixed feelings on both.
BTW, this is tangential, but have you heard of/played YU-NO? Apparently it was a pretty big influence on the Fate/Stay Night series, and they recently released a remake for PS4.
I've heard of it but don't know much about it. Since I loved FSN quite a bit I'll probably check it out eventually, though I wonder if I should do the original game or the remake.
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Re: Rax/Maz/Jimbo 2020 Games Thread: "S.T.A.R.S...."

Post by Eva Yojimbo »

Try to catch up tomorrow, but I'll mention I started playing Uncharted. It's a fun little game so far, though quite simple/straight-forward. It's strange not being able to stealth, and without that the game basically switches between shooting sections and puzzle/platforming sections. I will say I think the latter aspect is better here than in TLOU.
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Re: Rax/Maz/Jimbo 2020 Games Thread: "S.T.A.R.S...."

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I never played Uncharted 1, though your description seems to mostly match Uncharted 2 as well (Though it sort of has stealth). That game also had better puzzles than Last of Us though truthfully I wasn't crazy about them either.
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Re: Rax/Maz/Jimbo 2020 Games Thread: "S.T.A.R.S...."

Post by Eva Yojimbo »

Raxivace wrote:
There's an even worse problem with music fans. At the very least I can say that I've been apart of several film-related message boards where there were people interested in foreign films, old films, etc., and there were at least a few that was quite knowledgeable about those things... but it's been uncommon on any music forums for people to be aware of much (if any) music before they were born. It's also far more insular, where even if you get people interested in older music it's generally only music of one genre. There's actually been studies that show that most people's music tastes are stuck at whatever they heard/liked at 14, which is pretty depressing.
Honestly most of the music I like now is what I liked at 14, so I'm not one to talk here. You'll never take my light jazz elevator music away from me!! Especially whenever I'm reading an old hard-boiled detective novel and want something on in the background!!!!
Yeah, but you're not claiming to be a music fan so I wouldn't hold that against you. I do think it's odd that of all the arts, music seems most intricately tied to people's personalities and age. I'd be interested in knowing the science behind that and why it differs so much from film/TV/video games or even literature where people tend to get most excited about new stuff. With music, once you get past a certain age, it seems that people react to all new music as if it was just noise.
Raxivace wrote:
Anyway, I digress, but no I haven't heard of blowup about TLOU2/Schindler's List thing. You got a link?
https://twitter.com/jeffcannata/status/ ... 4246349825

Like its clear he's using Schindler's List as an example of a film that isn't merely escapist entertainment (Though even then, this comparison is still fairly flawed. Like even with the first part of the statement I wish most games were as good at being games as John Wick was as good at being an action movie), but man somebody that's been a professional critic for at least a decade IIRC should have freaking known that people were going to read that as comparing The Last of Us II to the horrors of the actual Holocaust. Know your audience for god's sake.
Wow, what a small world. So you know how I've been talking about watching TTRPG's? Well, besides Critical Role (the one I started a thread on), the only other one I'm still watching (I checked out several, and most were boring as fuck) is The Dungeon Run. Guess who the DM is? Jeff Cannata. I had no idea of who he was before that show and still don't really, so it's surprising to hear that he was a professional critic! I don't know about his talents as a critic, but he's an insanely talented DM. Dude has a real way with voices and descriptions and improv.

TBH, I don't find too much fault with what he said here. I think the comparison he's trying to make is "works that are difficult to experience, but are important and profound because of what they're saying/depicting." OK, so if you're wanting to pick a film for that comparison, you need something that actually meets that criteria and that people will actually know. Most of the "unpleasant, but about important stuff" films I know tend to be arthouse-y and pretty obscure, something like Salo or Irreversible or Antichrist or (even though we dislike it) Funny Games. Mention those films and few people would get it, so I understand him picking Schindler's List. My bigger problem is with how many people completely misunderstood the basis for the comparison. By what reasoning could anyone infer he was comparing TLOU2 to the holocaust? [gonemad] TBH, my bigger problem is him suggesting all other video games are John Wick. Sounds like something from someone who doesn't play many video games.

This might be a pretty big tangent, but reading about what he said of TLOU2 makes me reflect on some of the DM choices he's made recently. Not sure how to explain this succinctly (or if you'd even care), but I'll try. Basically, since CV started Jeff had to abandon the main adventure he had planned which involved the players exploring a (supposedly) pretty elaborate dungeon. They'd just opened the doors to it when CV hit and they had to isolate. Now, a big part of their show is audience participation in the form of cards that viewers can invent and then buy on stream to give to players (called "forces of good/evil"), and they basically had to drop that concept while in isolation. So Jeff had them travel back in time and into the bodies of pirates working for Whitebeard, a villain they'd previously killed.

Supposedly this "side-quest" was mostly just going to be about getting Whitebeard's treasure, but it's really turned into something much more than that, as towards the end they'd saved a family that was being captured/sold by Whitebeard. The child of that family ended up being the character that, in the future, basically enslaved one of the PC's family/community and killed many of them. So as Whitebeard is handing them over Jeff had them choose to either save the boy, or let them hand him over. They all chose to save the boy. The consequence of that was basically that they traveled through time again, this time to the day they all first met. They then went to the first dungeon they explored where they found a Chrono Dragon that basically told them if they chose to save the boy, he'd live a happy, peaceful life and would be like a brother to the PC whose family he grew up to enslave/kill; but the result would be that none of the PCs would ever meet, and that would be the end of their quest. If they chose to hand the boy over, then history would be as it was.

Basically the point I'm trying to make is that's... almost an impossible decision. He's essentially asking his players to sacrifice everything they'd done and worked for over the course of a year plus in order to be "heroes" to save the boy, or sacrifice the boy in order to continue with their adventure. He even mentions at one point that if they choose to save the boy and abandon their adventure, it might anger the viewers. I can't help but think his comments about TLOU2 being "difficult but meaningful" for players had some part in the direction he chose to take with his D&D game. If you have any interest, you can see it here starting at about 3:20:00. You can tell by the end just how wrecked the players are:

Raxivace wrote:
I'm not sure if hyper-recycling is necessarily a dead end because there's always more films out there to discover and add to the blender. The bigger issue is probably complacency and falling back on the same influences, in not being motivated to discover new stuff with the same passion you did in your youth before the business of actually making films took over. Tarantino already started doing that (recycling influences I mean) by at least Django and Hateful Eight. So that's definitely where I think having a deeper/broader pool of influences helps, in avoiding stagnation and repetition.
I agree with the gist of this, even if I personally loved Django Unchained and Hateful Eight.
I liked them too, but I do think it's gotten to a point where you rarely see "new" references/allusions/ideas in Tarantino, it's mostly just variations on what he's done before.
Raxivace wrote:Any time I've wondered if I've underrated my own knowledge its just made me think that I'm just being narcissistic in a convoluted way, and therefore Dunning-Krugering myself in the ultimate act of intellectual masturbation.

Maybe I need to take a break from the internet again lol.
Well, let me put it like this: how often do you read or talk to people online and go "yeah, that person knows way more than I do" VS how often do you read or talk to people online and think "man, that person doesn't seem to know anything!" I know the latter happens to me frequently and former quite rarely, and when the former does happen those are generally the people I start learning from. I think even having the ability to recognize when someone knows more than you about something feeds into the D-K thing because we've both seen people that are so ignorant they don't even recognize knowledge/competency when they see it. Arlon on IMDb/V.2 is the poster-child for that.
Raxivace wrote:
Plus, as long as we're always willing to learn and be corrected when/if wrong there's nothing pretentious about analyzing or discussing about what we do know or even what we think might be the case. I also learned a long time ago that the vast majority of people who use "pretentious" as a criticism against people are just insecure about their own lack of knowledge/understanding and prefer to criticize anything that's beyond that so as to shift the responsibility away from them actually needing to learn or improve themselves. There was an old thread on EGF where I actually suggested just "owning" the label of pretentious, like the way black people came to own the n-word, or women came to own the word "bitch." It takes the sting away.
Well I'm not quite sure its on the scale of either of those two words, but I see what you mean.
Yeah, as I wrote that I thought "those other things are way bigger issues than this" but I literally couldn't think of another example! Actually, maybe I can now: the very fact that I mentioned EGF should've made me think of how "geeks/nerds" have basically come to own those terms.
Raxivace wrote:
Definitely a possibility. I also learned from reading the DS companion (saying "I learned from reading You Died" sounds bizarre, though that's what it's called!) that Miyazaki also took influence from Arthurian legend, Nibelungen, and something else that I'm forgetting. Makes sense in retrospect given the game's frequently archaic speech and the feeling of ancient-ness about it all. Plus the whole archetypal stuff we talked about.
Interesting. While I've been going through a lot of the Arthurian stuff after playing Fate, I did pick up a copy of the Nibelunglied btw, and the sequel to it that apparently exists called the Klage.

I should probably pick up the Volsung stuff at some point too, so I can see the differences between the "Siegfried" versions of that story and the "Sigurd" versions of that story.
If you do go through Nibelungen stuff you really should, at some point, watch/hear Wagner's take on it. This is really just me making another attempt at getting you into Wagner. [blah]
Raxivace wrote:
I really need to get around to playing a fighter. They were probably the genre of games I played most as a kid (if only because it was the most common genre I played with friends), but I think part of me worries my reflexes have gotten to slow to be much good at them these days. Even back in the day there were often bosses on fighters that were incredibly hard to beat, and I'm not sure if I have the patience anymore.
I'm still terrible at these games myself and often put them on the easiest settings possible. Still, when they're fun and flashy I have a good time.
Which means you should definitely make Guilty Gear a priority.
Raxivace wrote:I never played Uncharted 1, though your description seems to mostly match Uncharted 2 as well (Though it sort of has stealth). That game also had better puzzles than Last of Us though truthfully I wasn't crazy about them either.
My biggest issue with the "puzzles" is that the actual puzzles seem childishly easy, and the traversal stuff, when it's not childishly easy, just seems a bit badly designed in terms of hinting at where you're supposed to go. Like, frequently there will be a chain you have to climb that completely blends in with the background. Despite that, I'm still enjoying the shooting sections, which, at least on Hard, provide a fun challenge. I think I'll probably finish it today.
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Re: Rax/Maz/Jimbo 2020 Games Thread: "S.T.A.R.S...."

Post by Raxivace »

Eva Yojimbo wrote:Yeah, but you're not claiming to be a music fan so I wouldn't hold that against you. I do think it's odd that of all the arts, music seems most intricately tied to people's personalities and age. I'd be interested in knowing the science behind that and why it differs so much from film/TV/video games or even literature where people tend to get most excited about new stuff. With music, once you get past a certain age, it seems that people react to all new music as if it was just noise.
If I were to make an admittedly uneducated guess, I get the feeling that a lot of music is 1) Written for a "youth" audience (People in teens/twenties) and 2) Written to appeal to youthful emotions anyways.

So perhaps once you've matured a bit but not a lot you start seeing new music as shallow kid's stuff, while having emotional nostalgic appeal for stuff you liked when you were a kid because that plays into, well, nostalgia but also what taste was in-vogue back then anyways.

Of course if you have real understanding of medium of music, maybe you can see at least some of the stuff kid's like perhaps isn't that shallow after all, and maybe is actually evolution of avant-garde music from so-and-so era/movement but done in a way that a popular audience can appreciate etc. Or just has generally strong craftsmanship. Or whatever else.
Wow, what a small world. So you know how I've been talking about watching TTRPG's? Well, besides Critical Role (the one I started a thread on), the only other one I'm still watching (I checked out several, and most were boring as fuck) is The Dungeon Run. Guess who the DM is? Jeff Cannata. I had no idea of who he was before that show and still don't really, so it's surprising to hear that he was a professional critic! I don't know about his talents as a critic, but he's an insanely talented DM. Dude has a real way with voices and descriptions and improv.
He's a cohost on the /Filmcast which is a terrible film podcast. IIRC Jeff was moved to tears by Avengers: Age of Ultron for god's sake. The man is in his 40's.
My bigger problem is with how many people completely misunderstood the basis for the comparison. By what reasoning could anyone infer he was comparing TLOU2 to the holocaust?
For a lot of people films are equivalent to their subject matter- Schindler's List isn't about the Holocaust, it is the Holocaust (Consider the Coppola quote about how Apocalypse Now is the Vietnam War for comparison). Now that's wrong of course, Schindler's List is actually just a film and IMHO not even the best on the subject matter, but I think Cannata should have known that people would interpreted his tweet as saying "This zombie game is equivalent to the Holocaust" (Perhaps a slightly more intellectual take is acknowledging that the horror of Schindler's List comes from "meta" knowledge that the atrocities of the Holocaust are real, whereas scares in Last of Us come from heightened melodrama of zombie genre tropes and such) even if that's not what he actually meant.

People may be dumb but usually not unpredictably so.
[gonemad] TBH, my bigger problem is him suggesting all other video games are John Wick. Sounds like something from someone who doesn't play many video games.
Yeah that's the other thing, its not like action games are all that exists, even before you get into niche stuff like the visual novels I play or whatever.

Like Tetris isn't John Wick.
This might be a pretty big tangent, but reading about what he said of TLOU2 makes me reflect on some of the DM choices he's made recently.
Perhaps he's a better DM than critic.

You save the boy, of course. At least if you're calling yourself a hero or whatever. To hell with the audience.
I liked them too, but I do think it's gotten to a point where you rarely see "new" references/allusions/ideas in Tarantino, it's mostly just variations on what he's done before.
That might be part of what's good about Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood now that I think about it. While its got his usual fascinations with movies and such, like 95% of the movie is also just a regular drama more or less which is kind of refreshing from him.
Well, let me put it like this: how often do you read or talk to people online and go "yeah, that person knows way more than I do" VS how often do you read or talk to people online and think "man, that person doesn't seem to know anything!" I know the latter happens to me frequently and former quite rarely, and when the former does happen those are generally the people I start learning from. I think even having the ability to recognize when someone knows more than you about something feeds into the D-K thing because we've both seen people that are so ignorant they don't even recognize knowledge/competency when they see it. Arlon on IMDb/V.2 is the poster-child for that.
When it comes to movie/art stuff I'm probably in a similar ratio to you. Still, while its easy to make fun of Arlon (I did so in my Lit thread! There's an enticement to go read it now!), I'll always worry I'm not just the Arlon to somebody else.
Yeah, as I wrote that I thought "those other things are way bigger issues than this" but I literally couldn't think of another example! Actually, maybe I can now: the very fact that I mentioned EGF should've made me think of how "geeks/nerds" have basically come to own those terms.
Yeah those are better comparisons.
If you do go through Nibelungen stuff you really should, at some point, watch/hear Wagner's take on it. This is really just me making another attempt at getting you into Wagner. [blah]
I'll probably read Wagner's script on Nibelungen first, and while I'm talking about Arthurian stuff I'll also get to Tristan and Isolde/Isuelt/whatever his version of the lady's name is at some point too.

You know when you think about it Tristan is basically Wolverine from the X-men. Started out as his own separate thing, but next thing you know he's absorbed into the stories of the Knights of the Round Table, as Wovlerine was absorbed into the X-men comics despite starting out as a Hulk villain. And like Wolverine, Tristan has adamantium claws too and a healing factor.
Which means you should definitely make Guilty Gear a priority.
Why do those gears have to be so guilty? I prefer to honor the innocent gears.
My biggest issue with the "puzzles" is that the actual puzzles seem childishly easy, and the traversal stuff, when it's not childishly easy, just seems a bit badly designed in terms of hinting at where you're supposed to go. Like, frequently there will be a chain you have to climb that completely blends in with the background. Despite that, I'm still enjoying the shooting sections, which, at least on Hard, provide a fun challenge. I think I'll probably finish it today.
I probably won't have much to add about Uncharted but I look forward to your review.
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Re: Rax/Maz/Jimbo 2020 Games Thread: "S.T.A.R.S...."

Post by Eva Yojimbo »

Try to catch up tomorrow, but for now:
Image

Uncharted: Drake's Fortune - 5/10

This is probably going to be a short and simple review for a short and simple game. This is basically Indiana Jones if Indiana Jones was a gun-toting super-soldier instead of a whip-cracking archaeologist. Actually, I might say the game reminds me more of Fritz Lang's The Spiders, which was an IJ precursor. The story involves the titular adventurer Nathan Drake, his grizzled partner named Sully, and a sassy newswoman named Elena hunting for El Dorado along with some dangerous pirates that want them dead. The highlight here is mostly just the chemistry among the characters and the top-notch voice acting from everyone involved, but the plot's so thin it barely exists to tie the gameplay together.

The gameplay is as simple as the story, basically switching between duck-and-cover shooting sections and quasi-platforming and puzzle sections. There are a few wrenches thrown in in the form of water ski sections, which has you blasting bad guys while navigating waters full of explosive barrels, and a section where you're manning a gun turret on a 4x4 vehicle while being chased by other such vehicles. Despite the simplicity, I did find the shooting sections fun, and a good challenge on hard. Each section had enough variation in terms of design and the placement of enemies to warrant several playthroughs in finding the best method to advance and take out enemies, and some weapons would be more suitable for some sections than others. The puzzle/platforming sections weren't as good, mostly due to their combination of simplicity and occasional bad design that would obscure where you were supposed to go.

Ultimately, this is definitely a fun little game and it's cool to see how the basic DNA of a game like The Last of Us is already present here, though the lack of stealth is noticeable. Probably the biggest refinement in TLOU to this formula was just the intelligence of the AI, though I feel like the puzzle/platforming, despite its problems, was done better here. Really, though, I think the big standout here was the chemistry between the characters, and even if the gameplay wasn't anything spectacular, I'm still interested to see how they developed this formula for future entries.

***

Will probably start Yakuza Kiwami either today or tomorrow depending. There's already like 7 games in that series too so I figured I'd try one out.
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Re: Rax/Maz/Jimbo 2020 Games Thread: "S.T.A.R.S...."

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Yeah that sounds pretty close to my experience with Uncharted 2. I will say that game tries to throw in some amount of depth for the Nathan Drake character where a villain chastises him for killing hundreds of people over the course of the game, but its not nearly as effective as something like MGS1's take on the same idea.

FWIW I hear people say Yakuza 0 is where new fans should start with that series (Even people that are otherwise generally "Play the games in the order they were released" people.) , but I've not gotten to those games yet myself. I was thinking of maybe going to Y0 anyways after I finished FF7 Remake (So many games right now and I haven't had much time in front of the PS4 I'm afraid. Usually its easier to play something on my laptop or a handheld) though FWIW.
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Re: Rax/Maz/Jimbo 2020 Games Thread: "S.T.A.R.S...."

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OK, I'll take the advice and do Yakuza 0 first instead.
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Re: Rax/Maz/Jimbo 2020 Games Thread: "S.T.A.R.S...."

Post by Eva Yojimbo »

Raxivace wrote:
Eva Yojimbo wrote:Yeah, but you're not claiming to be a music fan so I wouldn't hold that against you. I do think it's odd that of all the arts, music seems most intricately tied to people's personalities and age. I'd be interested in knowing the science behind that and why it differs so much from film/TV/video games or even literature where people tend to get most excited about new stuff. With music, once you get past a certain age, it seems that people react to all new music as if it was just noise.
If I were to make an admittedly uneducated guess, I get the feeling that a lot of music is 1) Written for a "youth" audience (People in teens/twenties) and 2) Written to appeal to youthful emotions anyways.

So perhaps once you've matured a bit but not a lot you start seeing new music as shallow kid's stuff, while having emotional nostalgic appeal for stuff you liked when you were a kid because that plays into, well, nostalgia but also what taste was in-vogue back then anyways.

Of course if you have real understanding of medium of music, maybe you can see at least some of the stuff kid's like perhaps isn't that shallow after all, and maybe is actually evolution of avant-garde music from so-and-so era/movement but done in a way that a popular audience can appreciate etc. Or just has generally strong craftsmanship. Or whatever else.
I don't know if most new (at least popular) music is written FOR a young audience, but it's certainly marketed to them; but the main reason is because teenagers are, by far, the biggest consumers of music. So it just raises the question of why that is so and why older audiences stop looking for new music, even if it's music made "for" adults. I'd also say that the concept of demographics is pretty problematic; it would be no different than saying NGE was targeted at the teenage demographic (which is true), but that has nothing to do with its status as great art that can/could appeal to adults as well. There's also the fact that pretty much all great music that's held in high esteem now was, at one point, marketed to teenagers. Hell, The Beatles were basically The Jonas Brothers of their day in terms of their primary target audience; and this is true even if we go back to jazz, especially early jazz. The cycle seems to be that the teenagers that grow up on that music become adults and then suddenly the music that the older generations dismissed as kiddie nonsense is now held in great esteem. This is something that doesn't really happen (or, at least, not nearly as much) in film and literature.

I've come to hypothesize that the biggest reason for this is that most people view music like fashion. When you're young it's very important because fashion is an expression of personality and individuality, but as you get older such thing don't matter as much because, well, life gives you other priorities. I also think the "music as fashion" mentality can persist even in people like that come to love music as music, the idea that they can't like certain genres or artists because they don't identify with the demographics of their audience, which is silly. Things like good melodies, rhythms, hooks, musicianship, composition, songwriting, etc. should transcend all that BS and be enjoyable by anyone that appreciates such things, regardless of who it's marketed to. I'd also say that most of the emotional content of pop music is relatable to older/adult audiences since most of it's about love and whatnot; but even if it's not, can you imagine dismissing films or literature that was about subjects you can't relate to? It would be like saying Do the Right Thing isn't a good film because you and I can't relate to racial discrimination. Isn't one of the great things about art its ability to make us sympathetic/empathetic to others' experiences?

To finish up the ramble, I'd even say I've come to appreciate a lot of "shallow" music because of the realization that it's awfully damn hard to come up with great hooks and condense them into a well-produced, 2-4 minute pop song. It's just not a talent that's as measurable as, say, pointing out the complexities in a classical symphony or something.

EDIT: As an addendum to the ramble, a lot of it probably also has to do with how the personality trait of openness seems highest when we're younger but slowly decreases with time, so younger people are, in general, just open to liking new music, while older people are just always complaining that new music isn't like the music they enjoyed when they were younger. Again, though, it makes me wonder why you don't see a similar trend in film/literature nearly as much. Maybe because music changes more radically than film and literature, or narrative art in general?
Raxivace wrote:
Wow, what a small world. So you know how I've been talking about watching TTRPG's? Well, besides Critical Role (the one I started a thread on), the only other one I'm still watching (I checked out several, and most were boring as fuck) is The Dungeon Run. Guess who the DM is? Jeff Cannata. I had no idea of who he was before that show and still don't really, so it's surprising to hear that he was a professional critic! I don't know about his talents as a critic, but he's an insanely talented DM. Dude has a real way with voices and descriptions and improv.
He's a cohost on the /Filmcast which is a terrible film podcast. IIRC Jeff was moved to tears by Avengers: Age of Ultron for god's sake. The man is in his 40's.
Never heard of it, so I guess there's that.

I don't knock people for what they're moved to tears by. I've teared up at commercials before, so, yeah. Plus, I know how easily people get invested and enthusiastic about superhero stuff, and it's probably even easier with long-running stuff like the MCU. That said, I also don't automatically love something I'm moved to tears by because the rational part of my brain regularly finds negative critiques in spite of whatever the emotional part is reacting to. Though I must say I don't remember Age of Ultron being particularly sad... was that the one where Tony Stark sacrificed himself at the end?
Raxivace wrote:
My bigger problem is with how many people completely misunderstood the basis for the comparison. By what reasoning could anyone infer he was comparing TLOU2 to the holocaust?
For a lot of people films are equivalent to their subject matter- Schindler's List isn't about the Holocaust, it is the Holocaust (Consider the Coppola quote about how Apocalypse Now is the Vietnam War for comparison). Now that's wrong of course, Schindler's List is actually just a film and IMHO not even the best on the subject matter, but I think Cannata should have known that people would interpreted his tweet as saying "This zombie game is equivalent to the Holocaust" (Perhaps a slightly more intellectual take is acknowledging that the horror of Schindler's List comes from "meta" knowledge that the atrocities of the Holocaust are real, whereas scares in Last of Us come from heightened melodrama of zombie genre tropes and such) even if that's not what he actually meant.

People may be dumb but usually not unpredictably so.
This is why I want no part of social media because I frankly don't want to be surrounded by people that are too dumb to think such things to where I'm always having to down my comments so as not to offend them or walk around on eggshells. Like, I can imagine if I'd said my "own the word pretentious like black people owned the n-word" on Twitter I'd probably have been ripped to shreds by a regular audience too, but because I was saying it to you I knew you'd know what I meant and that I wasn't comparing those two things in terms of scale/severity. I blame a lot of that on such poor education that no longer really teaches how similes/metaphors work. Like, I remember a long time ago when Matt Dillahunty was using his chess analogy for how morality works (we invent/agree on the rules of chess/moral values, but once we invent/agree on them we can analyze actions to objectively determine whether they're good or bad relative to our invented/agreed-upon goals), and the caller sat there silent for a second before saying "but you had to invent the chessboard, just like God had to invent the universe." It's like... at that point there's no reason in even trying to talk with those people, and that Cannata thread just looks like a lot of people with the same complete ignorance of how similes work.
Raxivace wrote:
[gonemad] TBH, my bigger problem is him suggesting all other video games are John Wick. Sounds like something from someone who doesn't play many video games.
Yeah that's the other thing, its not like action games are all that exists, even before you get into niche stuff like the visual novels I play or whatever.

Like Tetris isn't John Wick.
Even if we think in terms of "action/stealth games with substantial themes," there's a direct predecessor to TLOU in stuff like Metal Gear Solid 1 and 2 and Bioshock; and, as you suggested, that's ignoring all the non-action games out there. Like, a new-er game I've been thinking about trying some time is Catherine, and it's basically a puzzle game that involves a guy's relationship and his nightmares/fantasies about Catherine.
Raxivace wrote:You save the boy, of course. At least if you're calling yourself a hero or whatever. To hell with the audience.
TBF, I think I simplified the choice somewhat. Like, the PCs seem to be the only ones who know about the BBEG and her plans, plus they also basically ended a war between orcs/dwarves... so if they never meet, none of that happens either.

Still, even ignoring that, imagine playing a video game for like a solid year, where you've advanced your character and become really invested in the main story. Then you go on a side-quest where you're given an opportunity to change a bad event that happened, but the consequence is you'd have to start all over as a new character and play a radically different/new main storyline. Not that I think any video game could actually do that, but it's a fascinating thing to think about.
Raxivace wrote:
I liked them too, but I do think it's gotten to a point where you rarely see "new" references/allusions/ideas in Tarantino, it's mostly just variations on what he's done before.
That might be part of what's good about Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood now that I think about it. While its got his usual fascinations with movies and such, like 95% of the movie is also just a regular drama more or less which is kind of refreshing from him.
Makes me even more interested to see it. I've caught bits and pieces when my mom's had it on TV. She's a surprisingly big fan of Tarantino (though she didn't like Hateful Eight).
Raxivace wrote:
Well, let me put it like this: how often do you read or talk to people online and go "yeah, that person knows way more than I do" VS how often do you read or talk to people online and think "man, that person doesn't seem to know anything!" I know the latter happens to me frequently and former quite rarely, and when the former does happen those are generally the people I start learning from. I think even having the ability to recognize when someone knows more than you about something feeds into the D-K thing because we've both seen people that are so ignorant they don't even recognize knowledge/competency when they see it. Arlon on IMDb/V.2 is the poster-child for that.
When it comes to movie/art stuff I'm probably in a similar ratio to you. Still, while its easy to make fun of Arlon (I did so in my Lit thread! There's an enticement to go read it now!), I'll always worry I'm not just the Arlon to somebody else.
I don't think you have the Arlon-gene in you. Like, I find it pretty easy now to recognize people who know what they're talking about VS people that are just full of BS. Part of that comes with having read so many actual experts on various topics that I simply recognize what competence looks like even in fields where I'm very far from an expert. Of course, I realize that in such fields there are often disagreements among experts and whatnot, but most actual experts also tend to know where the line is between facts/knowledge and interpretation/opinion and so are careful about distinguishing between the two.

I will try to get to the Lit thread, but it's been all I can do to keep up with these threads while gaming and doing mandatory life stuff.
Raxivace wrote:
If you do go through Nibelungen stuff you really should, at some point, watch/hear Wagner's take on it. This is really just me making another attempt at getting you into Wagner. [blah]
I'll probably read Wagner's script on Nibelungen first, and while I'm talking about Arthurian stuff I'll also get to Tristan and Isolde/Isuelt/whatever his version of the lady's name is at some point too.
Now it's my turn to say "mods, ban this filth!" Reading Wagner would be like listening to EoE.... almost literally since the end of Wagner's Ring does with music what EoE does with visuals.
Raxivace wrote:You know when you think about it Tristan is basically Wolverine from the X-men. Started out as his own separate thing, but next thing you know he's absorbed into the stories of the Knights of the Round Table, as Wovlerine was absorbed into the X-men comics despite starting out as a Hulk villain. And like Wolverine, Tristan has adamantium claws too and a healing factor.
[biggrin] This is actually a pretty good analogy. Never thought about it like that. I vaguely knew about Tristan getting worked into Arthurian legend, but not the details of it.
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Re: Rax/Maz/Jimbo 2020 Games Thread: "S.T.A.R.S...."

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Eva Yojimbo wrote:I don't know if most new (at least popular) music is written FOR a young audience, but it's certainly marketed to them
Fair distinction.

I think what you're talking about still happens in film at least. Like isn't that part of why auteur theory was so controversial? The Cahiers kids championing people like Hitch and Ford and that older generations at the time were dismissing as simple entertainers?
I've come to hypothesize that the biggest reason for this is that most people view music like fashion
This is interesting comparison. I never cared for fashion when I was young, but well I wasn't a big music person when was I young either and didn't care for the bands that were popular where I grew up like Green Day and the like.

Anecdotally speaking anyways what you say seems like an appealing explanation.
To finish up the ramble, I'd even say I've come to appreciate a lot of "shallow" music because of the realization that it's awfully damn hard to come up with great hooks and condense them into a well-produced, 2-4 minute pop song. It's just not a talent that's as measurable as, say, pointing out the complexities in a classical symphony or something.
I agree.

Another thing to consider might be, uh, other cultural factors. Like rap music (I'm not sure that falls under "pop" too or not) seems to be what's most popular now compared to, say, rock 'n' roll in the 80's, and I'm sure there's racial tensions that factor into some of the people who dismiss rap.
EDIT: As an addendum to the ramble, a lot of it probably also has to do with how the personality trait of openness seems highest when we're younger but slowly decreases with time, so younger people are, in general, just open to liking new music, while older people are just always complaining that new music isn't like the music they enjoyed when they were younger. Again, though, it makes me wonder why you don't see a similar trend in film/literature nearly as much. Maybe because music changes more radically than film and literature, or narrative art in general?
I think it depends on where you look. Like when I was on my huge mecha binge, I saw and still see a lot of (Mostly older) people online swear to their graves that the older episodic shows of the 70's/80's were better than the stuff that was popular than the 90's. Ideon and Zeta Gundam were better than Eva, Dunbine better than Escaflowne, Getter Robo manga (Well I guess that had 90's entries too) better than Gurren Lagann etc. And I would personally argue Eva/Escaflowne/Gurren Lagann easily win those matchups on directorial level alone (Though its slightly trickier comparing to an anime to a manga with Getter vs. Gurren), and even on basic narrative level since they're not nearly as mindlessly repetitive as those shows get and have way better defined character arcs, more defined plots even etc.

Of course that's within a specific niche. More broadly speaking I think I agree with you. At least on surface level I can understand, say, rock 'n' roll fans feeling alienated by the rise of rap music and such.
I don't knock people for what they're moved to tears by. I've teared up at commercials before, so, yeah. Plus, I know how easily people get invested and enthusiastic about superhero stuff, and it's probably even easier with long-running stuff like the MCU. That said, I also don't automatically love something I'm moved to tears by because the rational part of my brain regularly finds negative critiques in spite of whatever the emotional part is reacting to. Though I must say I don't remember Age of Ultron being particularly sad... was that the one where Tony Stark sacrificed himself at the end?
Yeah but in writing this paragraph did you get so worked up about the memory that you started crying again? That's what Cannata did on the podcast.

Age of Ultron is the one where Stark builds Ultron and then builds another robot to kill Ultron. Like even of all the Marvel movies, that one of all movies just seems like a super odd one to get that worked up about at that age.
This is why I want no part of social media because I frankly don't want to be surrounded by people that are too dumb to think such things to where I'm always having to down my comments so as not to offend them or walk around on eggshells. Like, I can imagine if I'd said my "own the word pretentious like black people owned the n-word" on Twitter I'd probably have been ripped to shreds by a regular audience too, but because I was saying it to you I knew you'd know what I meant and that I wasn't comparing those two things in terms of scale/severity.
Yeah, that's why knowing your audience is such an important thing. Like yeah its exhausting having to constantly think about how you say something, especially online when people are more than ready to interpret it in the least charitable way possible. It's Hell out there.

I hope within a generation or so people can cool a bit on some of this somewhat though. Like some amount of sensitivity towards these things is good and IMO probably needed to happen in a mass cultural shift, however being in the middle of it while its happening does kind of suck and is naturally messy even when (Perhaps especially when) nobody on either side of some of these blowups actually has bad intentions.
I blame a lot of that on such poor education that no longer really teaches how similes/metaphors work. Like, I remember a long time ago when Matt Dillahunty was using his chess analogy for how morality works (we invent/agree on the rules of chess/moral values, but once we invent/agree on them we can analyze actions to objectively determine whether they're good or bad relative to our invented/agreed-upon goals), and the caller sat there silent for a second before saying "but you had to invent the chessboard, just like God had to invent the universe." It's like... at that point there's no reason in even trying to talk with those people, and that Cannata thread just looks like a lot of people with the same complete ignorance of how similes work.
Agreed. I will I say I don't think Cannata did himself any favors with how he handled the response though- IMO that's when should have made a strong clarification and not kind of waffled around a lot in responses, other threads etc .
Even if we think in terms of "action/stealth games with substantial themes," there's a direct predecessor to TLOU in stuff like Metal Gear Solid 1 and 2 and Bioshock; and, as you suggested, that's ignoring all the non-action games out there. Like, a new-er game I've been thinking about trying some time is Catherine, and it's basically a puzzle game that involves a guy's relationship and his nightmares/fantasies about Catherine.
Yeah MGS1/2/Bioshock are good to bring up as well.

I have the original version of Catherine on PS3 but never got around to it. Apparently the rerelease (Its got some lewd sounding name like "Full Body Edition" or something like that IIRC) adds a lot more story, though I've heard the new material criticized as transphobic. If you ever play it, let me know what you think.
TBF, I think I simplified the choice somewhat. Like, the PCs seem to be the only ones who know about the BBEG and her plans, plus they also basically ended a war between orcs/dwarves... so if they never meet, none of that happens either.
Well that complicates things somewhat, though if you can end a war once you can probably end it twice.
Still, even ignoring that, imagine playing a video game for like a solid year, where you've advanced your character and become really invested in the main story. Then you go on a side-quest where you're given an opportunity to change a bad event that happened, but the consequence is you'd have to start all over as a new character and play a radically different/new main storyline. Not that I think any video game could actually do that, but it's a fascinating thing to think about.
I mean, I've played two JRPG's that ask you to flatout delete your save file to save a character's life (I won't spoil the RPG's that did this), and I'm not sure its all that different than what you're suggesting. One of them wont' even let you make a new save file with the same name as the character you deleted, because the memory of them has been "lost to history forever" or some such explanation.
Makes me even more interested to see it. I've caught bits and pieces when my mom's had it on TV. She's a surprisingly big fan of Tarantino (though she didn't like Hateful Eight).
Honestly I'm surprised. I guess Pulp Fiction still has the whole "miracle" angle and such with Jules that might have appealed to her religious sensibilities*, but the rest of Tarantino doesn't really touch on that sort of thing (At least that I can remember off of the top of my head).

Please ask Mom Jimbo to do an entire writeup on the films of Tarantino for me.

*Side-note: I think this scenario with Jules is also a good counter-example to the notion you see online sometimes that deus ex machinas are ALWAYS bad storytelling and not a device that can sometimes be used well.
I don't think you have the Arlon-gene in you. Like, I find it pretty easy now to recognize people who know what they're talking about VS people that are just full of BS. Part of that comes with having read so many actual experts on various topics that I simply recognize what competence looks like even in fields where I'm very far from an expert. Of course, I realize that in such fields there are often disagreements among experts and whatnot, but most actual experts also tend to know where the line is between facts/knowledge and interpretation/opinion and so are careful about distinguishing between the two.
I'll probably always be second-guessing myself.

Its kind of frustrating that the skill you talk about in recognizing expertise is a bit hard to explain to certain people, because arguments like "WELL HOW DO YOU KNOW THOSE SCIENTISTS AREN'T REALLY LYING TO YOU? WERE YOU THERE IN THE LAB WITH THEM?" and the like are really annoying to deal with, especially in current times where there's actual public health risk and a life-or-death consequence for not knowing who to listen to.

Like the merely goofy creationists of my youth were one thing (And some of those goofy people were at least arguing in good faith anyways), but now its legitimately tragic that people will die because they just won't wear a fucking mask out in public or whatever because they listen to idiots and politically motivated goons instead of people like Fauci.
Now it's my turn to say "mods, ban this filth!" Reading Wagner would be like listening to EoE.... almost literally since the end of Wagner's Ring does with music what EoE does with visuals.
Hey I said I would only read it first! Not that I wouldn't also watch performances!!

Shakespeare is better in performance too though there's nothing wrong with reading him.
This is actually a pretty good analogy. Never thought about it like that. I vaguely knew about Tristan getting worked into Arthurian legend, but not the details of it.
Yeah he's straight up one of the Knights in the stories at a certain point, though I need to learn more details on how that actually happened. I think some say Tristan stories influenced Lancelot stories too.

Honestly its pretty interesting how these mythologies change over time, absorb elements of other stories/cultures, get elements extracted from them etc. Most controversial example of course might be flood myths that predate the Bible, as seen in Mesopotamian stories like Epic of Gilgamesh, Greco-Roman mythology etc. Or at least, that's controversial in America.

EDIT: Thinking about this some more, I wonder how much a willingness to be potentially "uncomfortable" is at the heart of a lot of what we're talking about here, and if people don't have enough of that willingness or not- whether its trying to new things, or being receptive to challenging ideas, or what sparks flame wars on social media, or handling ambiguity, or whatever else. Might have to think on this some more when I wake up in the morning.
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Re: Rax/Maz/Jimbo 2020 Games Thread: "S.T.A.R.S...."

Post by Eva Yojimbo »

Short on time today, but I did start Yakuza 0. I agree with Girlfriend Reviews that this game is 100% Certified BANANAS. Yesterday I did the side-quest where you protect a moonwalking Michael Jackson from zombies so Steven Spielberg can shoot his Thriller music video. I must say, the contrast of tones between the main game and all the side stuff is pretty jarring, almost like there's two very different games here, but it's undeniably fun. So far, combat is good but pretty simple/basic, even playing on Hard. Maybe the difficulty will ramp up later. So far, I've had far more difficulty with many of the mini-games, including a rhythm/disco game where it took me at least a dozen tries to beat the third challenge guy. I think I was just blessed by RNGesus the time I won because he was regularly scoring 8k plus while I was doing good to crack 6k, and on the one I won I scored ~7300 and he had ~6800.
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Re: Rax/Maz/Jimbo 2020 Games Thread: "S.T.A.R.S...."

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Yakuza sounds magical.
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Re: Rax/Maz/Jimbo 2020 Games Thread: "S.T.A.R.S...."

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I hope you get inspired by this game to become a real gangster, Jimbo.

Like you're already a morally compromised gambler and drug user, you might as well fully commit and start running booze and women too.
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Re: Rax/Maz/Jimbo 2020 Games Thread: "S.T.A.R.S...."

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So I finished the Fallout 3 DLCs. Generally speaking these are all kind of a mixed bag, though with a few high points across them.

If I had to rank these DLC's overall, it would be Point Lookout > Operation: Anchorage > The Pitt > Broken Steel > Mothership Zeta.

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Fallout 3: Operation: Anchorage (2009) - Kind of refreshing change of pace from the main game. It kind of gives me MGS1 vibes actually, since its set in what is a basically a “VR Mission", which itself is set in Alaska and the first part of the DLC involves deciding to either sneak into a base or just go in guns blazing, and then ultimately blowing up some turrets. A lot of guys you fight are invisible too, which reminds me of that part in MGS1 where you fight the four dudes with stealth packs in the elevator. The less-interesting second part of the DLC involves more running around through a big map, but you have the option of having a small squad of guys come with you since you're supposed to be a part of a military operation.

The whole level design here does feel very typical FPS, though that's kind of refreshing from the open world design of the game. You don't have any of your typical equipment here either, which does make the gameplay feel slightly tighter.

The weirdest part though is that the health system is different- instead of scrounging around for food though, you just run around looking for health stations to restore you to max instantly, which is fine but kind of odd. There are ammo stations as well for uh your ammo.

The whole reason you enter the VR Mission anyways is to help unlock a door to an armory in the real world for some guys and honestly as a framing device its pretty whatever.

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Fallout 3: The Pitt (2009) - This one involves a plot around a slave colony in Pittsburgh. Basically, a group from there are coming to Washington D.C., kidnapping people, and taking them back to "The Pitt" to mine for steel and such. You hear about this, pose as a slave yourself, and do various acts of slave labor for a while until your enter a colosseum type arena where you fight other slaves to win your freedom so you can meet with the leader of the area to steal a "cure" for a radiation based disease among the slaves, who want to revolt. It's very much Sparatcus or Gladiator or something like that, underneath Fallout 3's Mad Max-esque aesthetic. Also, the "cure" ends up being a baby with an unusual DNA or something, which brings about ~a moral dilemma~ about what to do (And makes me wonder if the DLC was trying to talk about stem cell research and such that I remember being very controversial at the time even if it doesn't seem to have been in the news much in recent years. In this DLC, that you kidnap the baby for a woman named "Midea" perhaps tips the game's hand a little bit).

It's kind of neat, and I like how once you're in The Pitt you're actually trapped there. Still, its kind of a shame that it doesn't really get all that interesting until the end with the baby stuff.

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Fallout 3: Broken Steel (2009) - The actual followup to the main campaign and its dumb. The bad guy organization still has some remnants around and you go on a few missions to fight some more of them. Big whoop.

The only really good thing about this is that it changes the ending to the main game so that your character doesn't have to pointless die to press the "lol purify the water" button, though plenty of people were complaining about that in the base game back in 2008. My takes are hot, I know.

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Fallout 3: Point Lookout (2009) - The best of these DLC's. Basically, in the main game you can find a woman whose daughter has gone missing, and she hires you to ride this riverboat and go find her. So you ride this riverboat to this swampy island area (I'm not sure if its supposed to be somewhere specific), and its a pretty atmospheric place, and a mini-open world in its own right. Dilapidated fairgrounds, broken down motel, a mansion, caves, a rocky beach, swampland etc. Again, its a really nice change of pace from the repetitive wasteland of the base game, and honestly the story is better too.

Instead of really looking for this girl you're hired to find, you quickly get drawn into this battle between a mansion owner and a cult that's been trying to burn his place down. The mansion owner guy hires to figure out what the fuck is up with the cult, and as you infilitrate them you find out that the cult leader and the mansion owner guy have a bit of a history. Pretty decent stuff tbh- my favorite part of this whole DLC (Besides the atmosphere) is this part where to "join" the cult you have to go to this swamp area to take some drugs, and there's this whole hallucinogenic segment that Fallout 3 just didn't really do in the rest of the game.

There are apparently a bunch of sidequests on this island too so despite generally being positive on this DLC I was kind of burnt out on Fallout 3 at this point and just decided to move on. Much to my regret, since last and also the least was...

Image
Fallout 3: Mothership Zeta (2009) - Ooof, this one was the worst of this bunch despite a cool sounding premise. Basically you get kidnapped by aliens straight out of bad 50's pop sci-fi, and you team up with other captives to fight them off and escape. One is a little girl from like 200 years ago, shortly after the nukes fell. One dude is a cowboy, another guy is a samurai that only speaks Japanese (And as far as I could tell, there was no in-game way to translate what he was saying). One lady is a raider from the same time as you. And lastly, one guy is from the "real" Operation: Anchorage which is a nice bit of mirroring to the first DLC I guess.

That part about people from different time periods having to work together is cool, though the problem is that none of these characters have like any depth to them at all, despite sections of the game where you're heavily encourage to do individual sections of the DLC with just one of them at a time.

Also the gameplay here is just kind of trash. The enemies are all samey aliens (Even the "hybrids" you fight toward the end aren't all that much different), individually they hit you way to quickly and often, there are too many of them, and the shield ones are way too tanky even for my endgame character. The actual spaceship itself you're on is mostly just a lot of corridors and hallways and such that is just not all that fun to run through, and it feels like it goes on forever.

Also, its glitchy as fuck. Like, by time I was doing this DLC I had run out of health packs. Not a big deal I thought, since similar to Operation: Anchorage this DLC has various health stations you can use. They're even a bit more balanced, since they have to recharge between uses and such. The thing is, they often would flatout not work for me. It got to a point where I had to do entire sections of the DLC with like, a single bit of HP because I flatout could not heal my character because this damn DLC did not function properly. I eventually got frustrated and just downloaded a mod to give myself Call of Duty-style regenerating HP, because holy shit (And I didn't mind all that much because I was basically done with this game by this point).

I already thought Fallout 3 was a fairly mixed bag at best to begin with, but yeesh Mothership Zeta really might be the most specific sour note in this game. Kind of a bummer to end on something like this.
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Re: Rax/Maz/Jimbo 2020 Games Thread: "S.T.A.R.S...."

Post by Eva Yojimbo »

So Yakuza 0 is basically eating up all my free time hence my recent absence. It's basically an RPG without leveling or story choices, but the amount of side-stories and minigames it offers is ridiculous. It's incredibly easy to spend an entire day (I've been playing about 4-6 hours a day) and not advance the main story one iota. I just got to Chapter 5 a few days ago and that's where you unlock the ability to buy and run a real-estate business, and I spent the last several days doing little more than grinding yen, buying properties, investing in those properties, and then collecting money on them (and battling the various real-estate moguls once you own most of their territory). I was also surprised to find out there's basically two separate stories here with two different protagonists in two different cities, and they seem to alternate every two chapters. I wasn't too thrilled with the story early on but by the end of Chapter 4 it started to get better and I just finished Chapter 6 yesterday and it's definitely picked up. Perhaps my biggest criticism so far is that the story definitely could've used with some judicious editing. It's easy to go into a cutscene that last 20-30 minutes without any warning. Some of them also seem painfully drawn-out and repetitive, but things have gotten better in the last few chapters.
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Re: Rax/Maz/Jimbo 2020 Games Thread: "S.T.A.R.S...."

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Sounds like the ultimate antithesis to Dark Souls (While still technically being in the same "genre") in a way.

Of course I love unannounced 20-30 minute cutscenes myself.
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Re: Rax/Maz/Jimbo 2020 Games Thread: "S.T.A.R.S...."

Post by Eva Yojimbo »

I've basically had to take the weekend off gaming to catch up on housework and some other stuff that's needed doing for a long time. I will say that I still haven't progressed the story much because shortly after you open the Real Estate business with Kiryu, you then open a Cabaret Club business with Majima (which is weird considering the guy already manages the biggest actual cabaret in the city). This ended up being a full-blown game-within-a-game (too big too call it a "mini-game" really) in which you go around recruiting and training female hostesses, and then using them to service customers that come in to increase their levels and stats. So it's basically a pseudo-RPG within a pseudo-RPG. Like with the Real Estate business the goal is to take over the areas owned by other club members, but this time it's through gaining "fans" through the business. The actual club mini-game itself is simple but addicting, basically consisting of matching your hostesses with patrons depending on the latter's likes so you can get them to spend as much money as possible while there at the club. While not difficult by any means there are some subtle strategies for getting the most money out of the time you have.

Yeah, you could definitely say this is the antithesis of something like Dark Souls, which is very singular and focused in terms of tone and design. TBH, I don't think you'd technically call Yakuza 0 an RPG, but it definitely apes several ideas from RPGs with the copious side-missions, random encounters, and using shops to buy items, etc. But there's no leveling or story choices, and the combat is mostly an old-school beat-em'-up brawler that reminds me of stuff like Renegade and Double Dragon back on the NES.
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Re: Rax/Maz/Jimbo 2020 Games Thread: "S.T.A.R.S...."

Post by Raxivace »

See anytime you post about Yakuza now I'm just imagining you're liveblogging your actual descent into gangsterism.
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Re: Rax/Maz/Jimbo 2020 Games Thread: "S.T.A.R.S...."

Post by Eva Yojimbo »

It's cute that you think I'm anywhere near cool enough to ever be a real gangster. Like, poker's a game for math nerds and I never even did cannabis until it was legal.

Anyway, short on time today, but dropped in to post this because the timing of it being released now was just delicious:
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4jH7Rp ... ex=34&t=0s[/youtube]
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Re: Rax/Maz/Jimbo 2020 Games Thread: "S.T.A.R.S...."

Post by Raxivace »

Jimbo, if Walter White can become a gangster then you can too! I believe in your potential!
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Re: Rax/Maz/Jimbo 2020 Games Thread: "S.T.A.R.S...."

Post by Eva Yojimbo »

Dropping in just to say I haven't made a lot of progress. Turns out it's not a good idea to put spring cleaning off until late August because I've been pretty exhausted the last week-and-a-half, so I've mostly been chilling with music and YouTube instead of gaming. Hoping to get back to it at least by this weekend and probably finish up Yakuza 0 some time next week. Planning on playing Cuphead next since it was finally released on PS4. Should also be a nice change of pace game.

I did get into watching some other YT gamer channels, including Marz (who really resembles Elizabeth Olsen) playing The Last of Us. I'm only mentioning this because her run had a ton of hilarious glitches that had me crying-laughing:

Ellie the invincible:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--WBjR9ZgfA&t=9m42s
Joel's suicide by drumkit:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkx19bOteo4&t=105m26s
Ellie backflips a Bloater (not technically a glitch, but still funny):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jGQ3tKclZps&t=36m22s
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Re: Rax/Maz/Jimbo 2020 Games Thread: "S.T.A.R.S...."

Post by Raxivace »

Honestly I've sometimes wondered how your spring cleaning can be such a momentous task for you. Like do you live in the mansion from And Then There Were None or something?
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Re: Rax/Maz/Jimbo 2020 Games Thread: "S.T.A.R.S...."

Post by Raxivace »

Wait a second, is "spring cleaning" a euphemism for getting rid of the bodies that had a "hit" placed on them? I'm onto your gangster ways now...
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Re: Rax/Maz/Jimbo 2020 Games Thread: "S.T.A.R.S...."

Post by Raxivace »

BTW Jimbo, while I'm looking forward to hearing your thoughts on Cuphead down the line after you finish Yakuza 0 (Especially since Cuphead is a game several of us here had played), is there any chance of you playing RE3 Remake any time soon?

I'd just be curious to know how someone less hardcore into RE than I am feels about it while its still sort of fresh in my memory, and a single play through of it is only like seven or so hours anyways (There's no A/B scenario stuff like in RE2).
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Re: Rax/Maz/Jimbo 2020 Games Thread: "S.T.A.R.S...."

Post by Eva Yojimbo »

Didn't quite get Yakuza 0 finished last week but I'm very, very close to the end. I'm on the last chapter and just couldn't stay up late enough to finish it the other night. I'm probably going to have a lot to say about this one because it's probably the mixiest mix bag I've played yet.

Spring cleaning is a mess because I literally move everything out of every room, steam clean the carpets, mop/wax the floors, clean the walls, dust/vacuum everything, polish the wood, and then move everything back. Every room takes a solid day to do. You don't know how filthy a place is until you move stuff out and start looking in all the nooks and crevices that stuff like book shelves and dressers hide.

I guess I could tackle RE3 after Cuphead, unless you really want me to play it before Cuphead. Only thing that gives me pause is that it hasn't been all that long since I played RE2 and I generally like to give these series a good break until I'm back in the mood for it. So while I don't mind playing RE3 I might not like it as much as I would if I waited a while, but it might not matter too much.
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Re: Rax/Maz/Jimbo 2020 Games Thread: "S.T.A.R.S...."

Post by Raxivace »

Eva Yojimbo wrote:Spring cleaning is a mess because I literally move everything out of every room, steam clean the carpets, mop/wax the floors, clean the walls, dust/vacuum everything, polish the wood, and then move everything back. Every room takes a solid day to do. You don't know how filthy a place is until you move stuff out and start looking in all the nooks and crevices that stuff like book shelves and dressers hide.
Dude that's why shelves and dressers were invented, to hide that stuff. Same thing with rugs- hence the expression "sweep in under the rug"!

You're going against the natural order of things!
I guess I could tackle RE3 after Cuphead, unless you really want me to play it before Cuphead. Only thing that gives me pause is that it hasn't been all that long since I played RE2 and I generally like to give these series a good break until I'm back in the mood for it. So while I don't mind playing RE3 I might not like it as much as I would if I waited a while, but it might not matter too much.
If you're not up for RE3 yet, that's cool.
"[Cinema] is a labyrinth with a treacherous resemblance to reality." - Andrew Sarris
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