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2020 VIDEO GAME CATCH-ALL THREAD


SirSmUgly

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19 hours ago, Zimbra said:

I wanted to try to beat Odyssey so I could play the Atlantis DLC, which I heard was cool and weird, but that ain't gonna happen.

Atlantis DLC is definitely worth the effort but didn't change my opinion about the game as a whole.  

Picked up two interesting puzzle games last week.  Ovivo is an intriguing puzzle platformer.  Very simple game.  You try to guide a small white blob through a maze.  The maze is divided into white and dark sections and you can flip between them.  Gameplay is physics-based so the trick is to know when to hop between white and black to take advantage of momentum and gravity to keep moving.  The white/black mechanic is a little similar to what developers did in Ikaruga and Outland, but the physics component really complicates things.  Basically, rules of gravity mirror each other in the two section (so in some areas, gravity drags you uphill not downhill) so it's hard to get your brain around the more complicated mazes.

Also played a good bit of the bridge.  This one is more of a puzzle game than a platformer.  Your character enters a single-screen maze that looks like a M.C. Escher drawing.  To navigate the maze, you have to locate the maze to keep creating avenues for your character to follow.  Again, gameplay relies a lot on physics.  Your character can't climb gentle uphills very well and won't negotiate a steep climb unless you rotate the maze to create a pathway he can walk without going vertical.  The maze rotation gimmick is fairly similar to LocoRoco, if that helps explain it.

Really liked both games and recommend them highly.

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They're not after a developer.  They're after the Unreal Engine.  The fact that Epic also published and develops for Fortnite is just gravy.

A Japanese company with a highly prized game engine would've never sold a minority share to Microsoft, but an American company had no issues cashing Sony's check.. 

Everyone will herald this as a good thing until Sony creeps towards majority ownership... I don't think they will because Sony needs allies in the US and goodwill from its American consumer base for the upcoming console war.  If they are offering Epic Games money, that just tells me that there is no Japanese company that currently has the innovations Sony needs to stay ahead of the game.

You'd have thought that since we're all AMERICA FIRST~! these days, a company based in North Carolina of all places would've mulled over the negative third order of effects of giving minority ownership to a foreign company, but money talked louder than nationalism.  Go figure. 

MAKE JAPAN GREAT AGAIN~!

Like I said, a Japanese company probably would've shut its doors rather than allow Microsoft to own any part of it.

Epic needs to play this smart.  There is already a lot of jabber out there about how Epic may deliberately gimp the performance of the new Unreal Engine for Xbox titles and they will literally kill about 40% of their market if Xbox owners up and mutiny over the notion that ports of their games for Series X will not be as crispy as PS5 ports. 

Epic needs to get ahead of any potentially horrible PR and assure their non-Sony customers that business as usual will continue.

Edited by J.T.
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More The Last of Us Part II:

Holy shit. End of Seattle Day 3. Woah.

I'm fine with the game no longer being Ellie and Joel's story. Ellie did the exact same thing Joel did to find her to Mel and Owen. But because it's her first time doing it -- it goes wrong.

Then Abby arrives at the theater and Jesse's death was rough. I was surprised at how quickly he was killed.

Yet people hate this game? Did they actually play it or just read the leaks and drew their conclusions based on that?

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Ubi has a press thing for the new Watch Dogs game on Monday.  I'm guessing they won't be taking too many questions.

Speaking of, the CyberDriver car chase mission from WD2 can eat a whole dick.

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@Lamp, broken circa 1988

Beat The Last of Us Part II this morning. I can safely say this is Naughty Dog's best game ever made.

There's so much in the game that echoes back to the first TLOU. Abby and Ellie's fight reminded me of David and Ellie's fight from the first game. The Rat King fight seemed like something out of Resident Evil. It also references other Naughty Dog games -- a lot of the setpiece action moments wouldn't be too dissimilar to something from Uncharted and I really liked the escape from the Seraphites' island.

However, the bad. The last 2 chapters are a bit rushed -- but the game is so long by then. I imagine there needed to be fleshing out of Abby/Lev's journey to Santa Barbara and Ellie leaving her Farm (and Dina & JJ) for Santa Barbara. But it would have been uneventful and no different than the earlier portions of the game.

If there's ever a sequel (and there will be due to the record sales), I hope that you play as Abby only and it circles back to the first game. Maybe Abby & Lev find a new doctor and reluctantly take Ellie from wherever she is (maybe a lodge like she was hiding in during the Winter section of TLOU) to the doctor; through the journey they forgive each other and give the game series a final closure. Dina and Ellie have their closure and Dina forgives Ellie for leaving again. Ellie finally sacrifices her life to make a vaccine and Abby realizes how wrong she was to kill Joel and goes back to Jackson to help distribute the cure.

Of course, Naughty Dog could (and would) say f that and doom the world again by killing off Ellie through suicide because that's what they do.

 

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Yeah, the subject matter isn't interesting to begin with.

That the game has this massive narrative disconnect where literally every gameplay sequence is a murder simulator in probably the highest level of detail ever done, but then so many of the big scenes are about trying to manipulate you into an emotional reaction over Bad Things Happening, it just doesn't work for me. I didn't like the first game. I don't really think the second game adds anything new from what I saw before I tapped out.

Honestly, I find TLOU games to just be pretty gross. It's clearly not for me.

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13 hours ago, Death From Above said:

Yeah, the subject matter isn't interesting to begin with.

That the game has this massive narrative disconnect where literally every gameplay sequence is a murder simulator in probably the highest level of detail ever done, but then so many of the big scenes are about trying to manipulate you into an emotional reaction over Bad Things Happening, it just doesn't work for me. I didn't like the first game. I don't really think the second game adds anything new from what I saw before I tapped out.

Honestly, I find TLOU games to just be pretty gross. It's clearly not for me.

Yeah,  I just found the first game unpleasant to play. I'm not interested in a realistic violence simulation. It was a well made game,  that I had any interest playing after a while. 

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I'm in the middle of it now, and I had to take about a week off from playing it.

I think the creators overplayed their hand.

What I loved about the story of the first one is that it seems pretty cliche. I thought the ending was going to be similar to Cormac McArthy's The Road. It was not that. The badguys were clearly badguys until the end - and then it went shades of gray.

I was kind of into Part 2 because it felt like the first time any video game ever commented on the myth of redemptive violence. I thought the impetus behind Ellie and Abby's journeys felt organic and  how they would eventually intersect appealed to me. But the game lays it on thick so much, from the big honkin' story twists, to the realistic details of dead dog yelps, and the death gurgles of humans that you know aren't technically "bad" - the "gameplay" becomes exhausting. Like watching Michael Haneke tell me how awful and complicit I am for viewing his movie, but worse.(I recently got an academic studies book on the Feel Bad Film "genre" that I feel will be applicable to this game once I read it.)

One effect of this is that I find myself running through missions as quickly as possible, sometimes just avoiding killing altogether. Just get to the end. But then what value was all that work the Naughty Dog team put into creating the gameplay? I can't take the time to enjoy all the details. I don't want to tactically pick apart the Seattle people with all the kewl weapons and intricate maps. That's probably why the Cult was introduced anyway - had to be someone you'd be willing to drop. But knowing this game they'll probably be the ones who were right all along.

All that being said... it sounds like I hate this game - but I don't. I like it because it's trying something new- even if it's trying too hard. And I actually do like Ellie and Abby. I find them fascinating to be interesting characters with strong and complicated points of view. I've only played Uncharted 4 and Last of Us 1 before these, and I thought they did okay balancing the cinematic and the GAME. This feels too much one way and I think I'd probably enjoy it more if it was just a movie sequel.

 

 

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Those of you who don't like TLoU - are you into horror movies? Crime dramas? Other forms of entertainment that glorify violence? Do you feel there's a difference between watching people portraying violence, and controlling a character who commits so much murder?

For me, I used to love horror but have fallen away from it because I just don't generally enjoy portrayed violence - but I don't feel that same feeling playing TLoU or any other game. I know I'm greatly simplifying it but to me, getting through an encounter in a game like this doesn't feel all that much different from me figuring out a puzzle or surpassing a difficult platforming section in other games. I'm not sure how to explain it besides it all hits the same beats in my brain, but show me somebody being blown to bits in a movie and I'll think it's fucked up (especially if it's ultra violence on television, where that's okay but a woman's nipple is censored).

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I can say unequivocally the I fucking love horror films. Bloody excessive violence - I'm in. I'm just a big emotional person. I'm always internalizing emotions of characters from books, movies, video games etc. I'm that dude that cries when characters die in TTRPGs.

I'd say the reason why I'm able to get through the game and even sometimes enjoy the violence, is because I can compartmentalize it into - "it's just a game", similarly to watching a horror film. But then the character that's been my avatar brutally murders someone in a cut scene and I've got no choice but to keep playing as that person it makes me the sads.

 

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My dislike of the TLOU games has nothing to really do with the violence level, I'm generally good for that stuff outside of kids.  My dislike is more feeling the story is boring and predictable and felt more "bad ending for the sake of bad endings because they're hip" than really trying to say something poignant, and the controls were fucking shite and Ellie's undetectability while playing as Joel and escorting here was full on immersion breaking.  Enough that even with the story I've read of 2 cleaned up some of my problems with 1's story, it's not enough to drag me back into doing a game I didn't enjoy, and I don't waste time on games I don't enjoy anymore just because a bunch of people say I'm missing out on a "classic".

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4 minutes ago, Raziel said:

 Ellie's undetectability while playing as Joel and escorting here was full on immersion breaking. 

It was the same issue in Uncharted 4 when Nathan Drake's brother was involved. Cracked me up. Anytime NPC sidekicks fuck up in a game, me and my whole family yell "I can't right now!" like Sheva from Resident Evil 5.

I liked Horizon Zero Dawn's solution of "you stay here while I check it out and when I get spotted rain down."

For all the realism I'm surprised at what they put in Last of Us 2 to bring me out of it. Shit that goes contradictory  to the core mechanics like the unstealthy NPC sidekick. The big ones are the vehicle missions. The whole game is built around conserving supplies but when you are riding shotgun in a truck during a chase sequence - you've got unlimited ammo. So weird. It's like the creators are going "It's more than a game - it's an experience!" one second and then "just go with it - it's just a game" the next.

 

 

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I feel like the various NPCs in TLOU2 do a much better job of being inconspicuous than Ellie in the first game.  Seems like the AI is programmed to stay behind you more often.  (Although sometimes that backfires, because I’ll wanr to fall back but the NPC won’t move quick enough and blocks me.)

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For me,  it's mostly that specific game.  I honestly think I'd have less of a problem if the game wasn't so well made. I don't need super realistic portrayals of up close and personal violence. With that said,  without really thinking about it, I play far fewer shooters than I did a few years ago. Im just not interested in them any more. I enjoy the occasional horror movie,  but never got into the gore porn movies. I watched Hostel and was legitimately pissed after watching the eyeball scene. It was more disgusting more than scary.  I can watch crime dramas.  I do remember an episode of CSI where one if there investigators was searching the house if a hoarder and accidently stepped into the chest cavity of a rotting corpse,  which I thought was a little too far. I don't think I'm overly sensitive to these things,  but the game wasn't enjoyable because of the way these violence made me feel. 

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I want to say it's just a game folks - storyline and gameplay conflicting really shouldn't matter.  

Then I remember my reaction to the end of GTA4, where I was immensely annoyed at the sudden moral conflict over whether to shoot one guy after shooting 73457345234788 to get to him, and that blows my argument all to hell.

Anyway, I'm only a couple hours into Last of Us 2.  So far my only complaint is that I HAAAAAAATE the controlls.

Edited by Robert C
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I honestly find that I get more satisfaction from the scavenging in TLOU than the action.  I would probably play a whole game that was just scavenging and crafting to solve environmental puzzles.

Kinda like how I just liked delivering shit in Death Stranding.

Edited by EVA
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As a general rule, I’ve grown to dislike hyper violence in my popular culture, whether it’s video games or comics or tv shows. I don’t think RDR2 falls into this category, since there’s not a lot of on-screen gore and I tried to play Arthur (and my online character) as close to a baby face as could be done. 
 

I think it’s one of the reasons I generally prefer old stuff to new stuff these days. (Part of it is probably being an old man Now)

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18 minutes ago, EVA said:

I honestly find that I get more satisfaction from the scavenging in TLOU than the action.  I would probably play a whole game that was just scavenging and crafting to solve environmental puzzles.

Kinda like how I just liked delivering shit in Death Stranding.

Is Death Stranding fun? Because it looks so fucking weird I want to like it, but I'm afraid it's just not fun to play.

Agree about scavenging in TLOU. In 2, I get way more pleasure finding and unlocking a safe than probably anything else in the game.

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14 minutes ago, jaedmc said:

Is Death Stranding fun? Because it looks so fucking weird I want to like it, but I'm afraid it's just not fun to play.

Agree about scavenging in TLOU. In 2, I get way more pleasure finding and unlocking a safe than probably anything else in the game.

I had fun with it for a while, but combat was a chore, and it ended up becoming FedEx: The Game and it got real repetitive real fast.  Toss in that a lot of the buildings require community involvement so early game stuff is in massive disrepair right now (although I did get 2 sections of highway back up before I moved on), it's solidly eh.

 

A good reminder of the downside of unfiltered Kojima though.

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Loving the replies!

Death Stranding seems to be a fucking love it or fucking hate it game, but it doesn't at all seem interesting to me, personally. Still, I enjoy the happiness people have gotten from it. 

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