Games

I finally finished my replay of Mass Effect 1 and really enjoyed it. So naturally I jumped straight into Mass Effect 2, which I absolutely adored when it was new and has long been in my mental top 10 games for a long time.

And fuck me, it suuuuucks. Admittedly I'm only like 3 hours in, but honestly it's kind of stunlocked me how wrong I was / how much my perspective had changed.

The gameplay is so telegraphed and 101-brown-cover shooter of the era it's painful. The combat is worse than (the admittedly improved in the Legendary edition) first game, with annoying abstracted difficulty, artificial limitations, and a shit simplified cooldown system for powers that doesn't feel like you're a squad but one character in three places. The accuracy is annoyingly imprecise, camera and reticle movement so sway-y it's motion sickness inducing, and the weapon sounds lack any and all punch or feel.

The RPG elements have been streamlined into near irrelevancy and despite the fact that the locations are richer and fuller visually, the world feels more lifeless because your squadmates don't really say anything or interact with it. In the first game, at any time you can turn to any squadmate, hit the interact button, and they'll comment on where you are or what's happening. Sure they only have a few comments for each place / bit of timeline, but it makes them feel like real characters and the three of you like a real squad. Your choices of who to bring on missions rarely matters, with anyone not key to the mission plots standing silently staring off into space in cutscenes as if they're bored by the whole thing.

In the first game, it hides loading screens between areas with longer walks through areas that reveal vistas and do dramatic scene setting when you arrive in new locations. Or uses elevator rides as opportunities for unique, often funny or insightful conversations between the different makeups of your squad that flesh out the world and the characters. In this one, everything is just a loading screen, making all the locations, worlds, ships etc feel completely disconnected from each other and often you're just dumped on a planet with little or no context for it.

Speaking of planets, the galaxy map is a mess and having to prebuy fuel (which doesn't burn at a predictable or internally logical rate) to travel certain areas of the map really sucks. Get 99.9% of the way to your destination and have the fuel number hit zero, too bad, doesn't matter if you literally have momentum to carry you the rest of the way, game takes over and flies you all the way back to where you started to refuel. Motherfucker, if I'm totally out of fuel how the fuck are you turning around a spaceship travelling at near light speed and sending it lightyears back the way I came instead of the next ten seconds of flight time with the momentum from previous thrust in the vaccum of space! Yeah, and the surveying and abstracted, multiple resource currency extraction fucking sucks too.

It really is like they stripped back everything that actually added depth to the world, the characters, your choices when building their stats and abilities etc. And then just layered on boring, accountancy bollocks mechanics and internal currencies over the top instead.

The returning to where you started fuel thing might seem like a minor but annoying thing, but it's unfortunately a symptom of a much much bigger problem. The first one built a unique and interesting universe with a truly amazing amount of lore, politics, internal logic, technological detail, and thematic depth. Honestly is shocking how well and deeply crafted it is right off the bat in the first game. And then the second game repeatedly goes fuck that! in order to make it more like the most generic slop imaginable from the time. Really cool gun technology that is based on a microcosm of the same mass accelerator tech as propelled all these cultures into the cosmos and is a major plot point and part of the lore? Nah, ignore that because we want a generic reload system like other games. A Star Trek/DS9 type thematic throughline about the difficulty but essential need to overcome differences, historical hate/war, and personal issues to succeed and survive? Nah, fuck that, everyone is a cool self-centred libertarian asshole who spends every conversation complaining about red tape and diplomacy and how's it's much more fun and cool to just torture dudes or whatever. That evil little splinter group that were constantly fucking up and getting themselves killed by running experiments to breed face-eating-space-leopards? Oh now you work for them, no you don't get a choice, and they've somehow become a massive intergalactic shadow government with more knowledge, technology, and resources than everyone else in the space of two years.

The whole game seems designed to limit your sense of choice, not just being forced to work for Cerberus. There's a million different upgrades and items to buy, but the economy is artificially tight so you can't afford to experiment. Same with the inability to easily or cheaply respec your character. Worse still is the Paragon/Renegade 'morality' system. For all its faults in the first game it worked thematically and allowed you to approach different situations with different reactions and attitudes. Because special dialogue choices/checks are now wholly tied to these morality points instead of putting stat points into charm/intimidate, the second game basically forces you to pick a binary 'good' or 'bad' right from the start and then pick those dialogue choices exclusively in order to have enough points to pass said checks. Any contrary choice cancels out previous ones so any nuance leaves you in a limbo where soon you can't pick either.

And the writing, oh god the writing. Conversations in the dialogue tree often don't flow at all. Sometimes asking one option before another will inexplicably remove to option to ask the other as a follow up. Other times you can choose multiple options after one another but they give the same info or even exact same voice line anyway. It also has a terrible case of meta-scriptitus. Characters know things they couldn't know, assert things that go against character, just because it's needed to advance the plot. The plot that's also a fucking mess. Even in just the first few hours, if you actually read or listen to some logs & extra dialogue, you realise that the entire plot setup doesn't make any fucking sense...

Just nonsense. I could go on, but like with the game, I'm finding it hard to summon the will to continue.

I finished completionist plus. Now the true grind begins

I just beast Metaphor, it's VERY liberal but it was fun. I can't say I wouldn't have rather had Persona 6 by now though

Silksong looks pretty cool but I never beat Hollow Knight so I'm playing it now.

Just finished Silksong. Too burnt out to get to 100% which at this point I think is mostly lore stuff or maybe bestiary if that counts.

Hollow Knight is absolute peak. I got the first 2 endings, there's 3 more to go. I also want to get all the achievements, but some of those make me sad of even thinking about doing it, lol.

Also I just found out there's at least 2 gay couples in the game, I feel sad for not knowing and killing one of the dudes because he asked me to :(

Played some Persona 5 earlier in the week but now Warframe has me deep in the forma mines. I HATE THE HEMOCYTE I HATE THE HEMOCYTE

Still on that Death Stranding 2 playthrough. I'm really only playing on the weekends and taking my time to savor it. The gameplay is as tight as any Kojima game has ever been and DS2 feels like the logical evolution of MGS5, of all things, whereas DS1 felt like a side-step. I remember reading some pre-release reviews where Kojima said people on his team were saying that the game was getting "too Metal Gear". I can see why, but I love that shit. Review standpoint, I'm waiting until I finish the game before I pass any judgement on it. I'm almost 40 hours in and it still feels like things are ramping up narratively.

Other than that, I'm still playing Rimworld. I have all the DLC, but I'm trying to remember how to play the game before I dove into any of that. I just finished a vanilla playthrough and started a Royalty DLC playthrough now allying with the Empire.

Abiotic Factor is still on-going. Not much progress since last week. Working my way through the Reactor sector which is totally new content for me. I have a base set up in Torii that I'm trying to beautify and make functional at the same time.

Really liking these threads because they're my only chance to really discuss video games with people. I'd love to do a podcast or make content or something.

Silksong

Bowser's inside story ds, I'm stuck on a Kaiju boss battle because my mic won't pick up my blowing into the mic

I played FTL for a bit to try to unlock new ships, im using the mantis cruiser since if i get one achivement i unlock a new mantis ship or if i win i unlock the slug ship, fighting automated ships has been a little had but since im using adv content i could get a lanius and teleport him to the automated ship sto slowly destroy him, also im trying to use mind control because its really fun

I got Star Wars Galactic Battlegrounds which is a game i used to watch a lot of playthrough as a kid since i was a fan of AOE2 and star wars, it was at like 1 USD on steam so i got it, also i downloaded a popular Mod called Expanding Fronts which updates the game, fixes bugs, framerate, and most importantly it add more factions and reworks the other ones to get them on the same level

I played a match as the Trade Federation and it was reallly fun, they get the huns bonus of not having to built houses but they collect carbon 10% slower which is fine, but a bigger bonus is that their basic trooper get a 5/20/35% discount for the regular trooper in the 2nd tech level which lets you just spam them so i just swarmed my enemies with basic B-1 battle droids with droideka support,

Its really fun i recommend it

more mechwarrior 5 mercs
still not made it to the new dlc lmao
having a lot of fun getting there though

Been playing halo infinite since they added invasion. Having a really good time. Games in a good spot right now

Never played A Zelda before, Started playing botw on my handheld. The movement and climbing is cool. Game seems like it will be huge tho I don't have time for that

got burnt on silksong, still playing wow classic sweaty style, not sure what single player i should start up, doing a bit of KH1 in the meantime, trying to 100% it slowly but surely maybe play some of the other games in the series.

I've just started Sable, it's interesting. Very unique art style and the gameplay is peaceful climbing/gliding/hoverbiking exploration.

Midnight Club 3 Dub Edition Remix! My favorite racing game ever. Something about using the right stick as the accelerator/brakes really tickles my brain. Not aware of anything else that plays like the series, and it's a shame that it's just rotting away in Rockstar's backlog.

I've been absolutely loving Project: Silverfish. It's similar to the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series and escape from tarkov.

Silksong, and since we finally have a 1.0 date, been dipping deeper into Hades 2. Been sitting on my list since Christmas, but I didn't want to burn myself out on the early access content before actually knowing when we'd get the full game.

I picked up Deadzone Rogue, been having fun with it, trying to get some friends to grab a copy but I'm not sure how much staying power it will have.

Silksong, the new Shinobi, Mario Odyssey, and DKC Tropical Freeze.

Yup, ive definitely got a type. Some DMC3 in there too, and ill start Seven Samurai 20XX once I finish one of the above!

All are being emulated on a Retroid 5

No spoilerinos plz but im gonna start Stray Gods: The Roleplaying Musical. Its says whats on the package I assume. Should be a fun romp that hopefully distracts me from IRL stuff.

same as last week's thread, i'm playing dragon age the veilguard. recently upgraded my CPU, RAM, and GPU so it's looking real good. the game its self has some of the best combat i've ever played in a game. at least for the class i'm playing. i've always wanted a wizard game that felt more like this and they made something better than i was imagining.

Fantasian and Helldivers 2 ^>vvv

A bit of Path of Exile 2, got myself a headhunter.

about 2/3 of the way through the main story of rise of the tomb raider, I’ve done almost all of the extra tombs up till now but I think I’m gonna speed it up and just follow the main quest line and then come back to everything else after

also playing 2 old school style platfomers here and there called Bzzzt and Froggy Bouncing Adventures, the second one is totally unknown, almost no reviews up for it, it’s quite cozy and you jump around as a froggo, Bzzzt has some nice pixel art and chiptune-like music, feels like a modern snes game