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Videogames: The Sequeling


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5 hours ago, polishgenius said:

On your differing experiences between first and second times playing it, there's a fairly interesting vid about how games frame themselves for new players or experienced players, framed via Hollow Knight being the first game the vid-maker's wife tried to play. HK is only really the jumping-on point but still.

Also did you ever play Cave Story in your game journey since? It's not a true Metroidvania since it's story gated more than ability gated, and graphically it's, ahem, a bit simpler than HK, but it's a remarkable game. The combat's more run-and-gun than the hand-to-hand of HK, mind.

I can relate a lot to some of his wife's issues in that video -- one of the things that kept me from trying games out for a long while was being intimidated by the complexity of the controls, though I definitely found that my imagined version of controller difficulty was way worse than the actual experience of using one. He uses Breath of the Wild as a good example of clearly explaining both what buttons do and where those buttons are, and I definitely benefitted from starting out with BotW as my first game on the Switch.

Have not played Cave Story, but just added it to my wishlist.

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14 hours ago, Mr. X said:

Same.

I stumbled into Deepnest accidentally one night while playing with headphones on and had some trouble sleeping later on.  Will likely drop everything to play Silksong when it finally arrives.

I never really got into gaming at any point in my life until last fall. For context, I'm old enough that our first home computer was a IBM PC clone and the original NES came out when I was in grade school. The original Legend of Zelda was a big deal back then. I remember friends bringing magazines to school to study the overworld maps together.  I might have played five or ten minutes of it at a friends house and died many, many times in that brief time span. My parents never let us buy any of the consoles, and, aside from the occasional casual multiplayer games at friends' houses, a brief obsession with whatever version of Civilization my college housemate had on his computer, and playing through whatever Zelda games were available on the GameBoy Micro during grad school, I played little in the way of computer games beyond Tetris and Minesweeper until last year.

It started with Night in the Woods shortly after Covid shut everything down. Then, in September, Xray texted me to say that a local store had Switches in stock for the first time in months. They placed the order, I picked it up on the way home from work, and bought Breath of the Wild that night.  (Well, not that night--somehow, our Switch arrived with no joycons, so I had to hit BestBuy on the way home from work the next day.)  Spent the next month or so playing through that, started looking around at other games, and bought Hollow Knight almost entirely on a whim.

(And by "on a whim," I mean it was on sale and the art looked awesome.)

Got hooked after a few hours of Hollow Knight. Got frustrated more and more as I got further into it and kept hitting the wall of my profound lack of skill (and/or experience) with games. Put it down for a week at least once or twice, but eventually ground my way through to completing the "bad" ending. Loved the world, loved the art, and loved the music. Learned the term "metroidvania" because of that game and went on to check out some other things in that genre, including both Ori games, which are also wonderful.

In the midst of a bunch of workplace drama and stress, some of which was Covid-related and some of which would be terrible in a non-pandemic year, I found myself needing an escape, so started Hollow Knight again from scratch. Sure, I absolutely benefited from having completed it once, but a lot of things went more easily more me, especially things like boss fights, where I realized I'd learned to be more patient and not just spam the attack buttons in a blind panic. At least one boss who took me a week to beat the first time around fell on the third try. And eventually, after way, way, WAY more than 40 attempts, I even beat the true final boss. 

I spent a lot of this year dealing with the combined stresses of teaching in hybrid and remote settings, commuting on the subway regularly in a city where the positivity rate was often in the 7% to 10% (or higher) range, and being gaslit and sidelined regularly by our school administration. It was exactly the sort of year where playing a void creature killing the shit out of a bunch of reanimated bugs counted as a positive mental health exercise and beating the true final boss, even if it meant spending an entire week fighting her over and over again, felt like a genuine accomplishment.

I still kind of suck at video games, but I suck a lot less, largely thanks to Hollow Knight.  And this school year sucked, but it definitely sucked less thanks to video games in general, and to Hollow Knight in particular.

So yes, I fucking love Hollow Knight.

Serious kudos to you. Hollow Knight is definitely not an easy video game, especially for someone who hadn't played any in thirty or so years. I really respect your perseverance, and I'm happy that this game and killing reanimated bugs could help you in such a shitty year. No matter where you live, it seems that teachers were horribly treated this year; my elementary/high school teacher friends have all said the same thing. I'm sorry you had to go through this, but thank you for all you did and all that I'm sure you continue to do for your students.

I'm also curious - as someone coming back to video games after so long away, what did you think of Breath of the Wild?

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1 hour ago, Caligula_K3 said:

Serious kudos to you. Hollow Knight is definitely not an easy video game, especially for someone who hadn't played any in thirty or so years. I really respect your perseverance, and I'm happy that this game and killing reanimated bugs could help you in such a shitty year. No matter where you live, it seems that teachers were horribly treated this year; my elementary/high school teacher friends have all said the same thing. I'm sorry you had to go through this, but thank you for all you did and all that I'm sure you continue to do for your students.

I'm also curious - as someone coming back to video games after so long away, what did you think of Breath of the Wild?

Thanks.

I had some early troubles with BotW. It was my first 3D Zelda, as all the ones I played on the GameBoy Micro were 2D sidescrollers and, having never had any of Nintendo's home consoles, I've never played anything from Ocarina onwards. So that took some getting used to. I remember taking a break from it early on after getting frustrated by first accidentally throwing away an axe from the top of a tower (see earlier comments about adapting to so many buttons on the controller) and then trying to fight enemies with fallen branches and what not. After picking it back up, I managed to find my way to the Divine Beast in the desert, which I later learned was the toughest of them all. I think I did have to leave that unfinished and come back and kill whatever version of Ganon was in there until I had some more skills and gear and what not.

Having played the early games, I knew the basics of the Zelda games, but the stamina wheel, camera control, and the cooking things all took some getting used to. Weirdly, the thing that won me over to the cooking was making Dubious Food for the first time, as I always welcome a good laugh.

Mostly, I loved the freedom to go explore the world. I kept going after beating the final boss(es) just to get the rest of the shrines and uncover the full map. Considering I set out to run every block of my roughly 2 square mile neighborhood a few summers ago, I am not surprised I like to do the same thing in a game as I do in real life.

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Adam Jensen's voice actor (who's done a lot of great work in many games and TV shows, including The Expanse), Elias Toufexis, doing a live play of Mankind Divided. As he notes, this means he can give in-character commentary and responses to people in the game which is a handy advantage over 99.999999999% of the rest of players.

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10 hours ago, Werthead said:

The final mission does suffer a bit from "and suddenly zombies," but still fun (I lost track of how many people I rendered unconscious in my attempted-nonlethal playthrough which once again failed, because I think a couple of guys I rendered unconscious were killed by a misthrown grenade.

I've never actually finished a non-lethal playthrough of Human Revolution, since the game makes it clear that playing non-lethally has its morally negative sides as well. For example, you can overhear a Derelict Row gangbanger discussing his plans to murder a random homeless person. If you don't kill him, you are dooming an innocent person to be murdered.

Instead, I play mostly non-lethally, but drop it against bosses, or when my opponents are clearly evil people who would go unpunished otherwise (such as mercenaries who murder a hotel full of civilians in Hengsha), or in time-critical situations (such as saving Malik).

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13 minutes ago, Gorn said:

I've never actually finished a non-lethal playthrough of Human Revolution, since the game makes it clear that playing non-lethally has its morally negative sides as well. For example, you can overhear a Derelict Row gangbanger discussing his plans to murder a random homeless person. If you don't kill him, you are dooming an innocent person to be murdered.

Instead, I play mostly non-lethally, but drop it against bosses, or when my opponents are clearly evil people who would go unpunished otherwise (such as mercenaries who murder a hotel full of civilians in Hengsha), or in time-critical situations (such as saving Malik).

Yeah, Malik is a tough one. I think you can do it because the only two enemies doing huge amounts of lethal damage against the downed aircraft are the robot and the heavy, and the heavy can be knocked out and robots don't count towards Pacifist.

Ghosting whilst saving Malik I'm sure has been done, but it seems exponentially harder since you need to destroy the robot somehow without being noticed and take down the heavy without anyone noticing you, which is an incredibly tall order.

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Scarlet Nexus is the game I've been playing so that I don't just mainline Mass Effect. I started out liking it a lot, but, 15 hours in, I've cooled significantly on it. The combat itself remains fun and stylish, albeit starting to overstay its welcome (but then again, I'm the kind of guy who'll play a Devil May Cry game, beat it in 9 hours and never touch it again; pure character action games get old for me pretty quickly). The problem is that the writing is so incredibly godawful that it makes many the cutscenes actually painful to watch.

I don't mind that all the characters are all anime tropes, I expected that going in. And as tropes they're fine, and the "character bonding" scenes are all fine for what they are. The problem is absolutely everything related to the main story, and there's a lot of story. The underlying plot seems to have an appropriate amount of fun, stupid bullshit, but its mostly glossed over. Instead, there's just sequence after sequence of inexplicable events happening that no one ever questions. And they never talk amongst themselves about these things. Instead, they spend huge amount of times rehashing mundane melodrama and ignore everything happening around them. Occasionally, an NPC starts to make a reveal, shuts up after 2 sentences, and no one presses them to elaborate at all. If that happened once in a while, that'd be one thing, but this is the only thing the story ever does and I'm really sick of it. The game has two parallel campaigns, and no ways am I doing the second one. I'm not positive I'll even finish the first one, though I'm about 3/4ths through it already so I may try to push through.

Or not. I checked out the Monster Hunter Stories 2 demo last night, and it seems like a fun, possibly mindless pokemon clone. I've still got I think a bunch of demo to go, so I dunno if I'll buy it; but that might be my change-of-pace game. Or actually my main game. I finished Rannoch in ME3 also last night, so there's not really that much game left. Even with the Levithan and CItadel DLCs left.

I'm also, goddess help me, debating whether to give ME:A another shot. I know I shouldn't, but I haven't touched it since release and maybe having my expectations at rock bottom now will make an acceptable time waster. Also, if the next Mass Effect game does have some sort of connection to ME:A, I should probably at least know how that game's story ends (I quit like 30 hours in). Though I've got time, since I assume March 2023 is the earliest that game releases, and it might be much later than that.

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Just finished Pillars of Eternity II, and I think I agree with the consensus. Pillars 2 has fabulous artwork and design, and I appreciated the effort to develop a very different sort of fantasy location to the Dyrwood. But Pillars 1 has a better plot. Perhaps better is the wrong word - I don't think the plot of Pillars 1 is inherently more interesting than the one in Pillars 2, but the pacing and execution are better. As others have said, so much content in Pillars 2 is optional - it's a game world that's meant to be explored, every island visited and ransacked. But all the time the plot is telling you - stop wasting time and chase after the big blue god. 

There's a big gulf between where the narrative drive is pushing you, and what you're probably doing: in my case, collecting huge numbers of pets to make Eder happy, and rummaging through every chest and cabinet in the Deadfire. (That said, the onscreen realisation of Eothas was really special. Whenever I criticise Pillars 2, I keep thinking of the aspects it got so damn right I want to cheer).  Compare contrast with Baldur's Gate 2 which integrates the exploration with the plot near the start through its raise loads of money quest. 

I'm not sure which game has the stronger writing. At the moment, I think some of the sidequests in Pillars 1 might have been a little more complicated than in Pillars 2, but I'd need to replay to be sure. In terms of companions, I liked the ones in both, though I think Pillars 1 might have the edge for providing the bananas and entertainingly repulsive Durance, who I believe was a Chris Avellone character. The humour in Pillars 2 made me laugh out loud way more than most TV comedies. Tayn and Concelhaut's skull in the Forgotten Sanctum expansion were priceless. 

Spoiler

I ended up going it alone in the finale because I couldn't stand any of the factions. I was ready to support the Huana, but then the queen wanted me to stitch up Director Castol, and I quite liked him (my version of the trolley problem) so I reloaded from before blowing up the Powderhouse and set off for Ukaizo on my lonesome. And now the Deadfire is in an even worse mess than when my Chanter Carolo, Captain of the Devil of Caroc, arrived on the scene. Oops. 

Now I'm going to go into withdrawal because Pillars 1 + Expansions, and Pillars 2 + Expansions have been the sum total of my video gaming for months. 

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42 minutes ago, dog-days said:

Just finished Pillars of Eternity II, and I think I agree with the consensus. Pillars 2 has fabulous artwork and design, and I appreciated the effort to develop a very different sort of fantasy location to the Dyrwood. But Pillars 1 has a better plot. Perhaps better is the wrong word - I don't think the plot of Pillars 1 is inherently more interesting than the one in Pillars 2, but the pacing and execution are better. As others have said, so much content in Pillars 2 is optional - it's a game world that's meant to be explored, every island visited and ransacked. But all the time the plot is telling you - stop wasting time and chase after the big blue god. 

There's a big gulf between where the narrative drive is pushing you, and what you're probably doing: in my case, collecting huge numbers of pets to make Eder happy, and rummaging through every chest and cabinet in the Deadfire. (That said, the onscreen realisation of Eothas was really special. Whenever I criticise Pillars 2, I keep thinking of the aspects it got so damn right I want to cheer).  Compare contrast with Baldur's Gate 2 which integrates the exploration with the plot near the start through its raise loads of money quest. 

I'm not sure which game has the stronger writing. At the moment, I think some of the sidequests in Pillars 1 might have been a little more complicated than in Pillars 2, but I'd need to replay to be sure. In terms of companions, I liked the ones in both, though I think Pillars 1 might have the edge for providing the bananas and entertainingly repulsive Durance, who I believe was a Chris Avellone character. The humour in Pillars 2 made me laugh out loud way more than most TV comedies. Tayn and Concelhaut's skull in the Forgotten Sanctum expansion were priceless. 

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I ended up going it alone in the finale because I couldn't stand any of the factions. I was ready to support the Huana, but then the queen wanted me to stitch up Director Castol, and I quite liked him (my version of the trolley problem) so I reloaded from before blowing up the Powderhouse and set off for Ukaizo on my lonesome. And now the Deadfire is in an even worse mess than when my Chanter Carolo, Captain of the Devil of Caroc, arrived on the scene. Oops. 

Now I'm going to go into withdrawal because Pillars 1 + Expansions, and Pillars 2 + Expansions have been the sum total of my video gaming for months. 

Have you played Tyranny, the semi-thematic follow-up in the same engine? In terms of story and characters, I rate it far above the PoE duology. It's also more concise, which was a relief (taking a meh story and dragging it out to 50+ hours doesn't help it, but a tight 30-hour story is a great thing).

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7 hours ago, Werthead said:

Have you played Tyranny, the semi-thematic follow-up in the same engine? In terms of story and characters, I rate it far above the PoE duology. It's also more concise, which was a relief (taking a meh story and dragging it out to 50+ hours doesn't help it, but a tight 30-hour story is a great thing).

Not yet - it's on my list along with Outer Worlds. Thanks for the recommendation. 

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Took out the 2nd boss in Returnal over the weekend and got a new gadget that opens up the exploring quite a bit in previous areas as well as a shortcut to the new zone.  Built up a really good run, had some awesome new weapons, increased my health to 200%, and meandered my way to a mini-boss that absolutely wrecked me with a laser sword that clipped me through a wall.  Had to take a break after that one.  Also tried my hand at some of the challenge rooms and I have yet to complete one.  It's basically fighting 3-5 mini bosses (depending on the rng) in a cramped area for what I would assume to be decent loot.  Hoping I can get some time to tackle the third area this week.

There's not a ton of good games for the newer systems yet, but Returnal has been my favorite by a long shot.  3D Metroidvania roguelite shooter that gives Dark Souls a run for its money on the difficulty scale.  I fucking love it.

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21 hours ago, Werthead said:

Have you played Tyranny, the semi-thematic follow-up in the same engine? In terms of story and characters, I rate it far above the PoE duology. It's also more concise, which was a relief (taking a meh story and dragging it out to 50+ hours doesn't help it, but a tight 30-hour story is a great thing).

Tyranny is one that I want to replay at some point.  Really enjoyed it. 

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Man, I forgot how much better Mankind Divided is than Human Revolution. The level design is much better (and it wasn't a slouch in HR, beyond the constraints of 360/PS3 memory meaning areas were quite small), Prague is a much better, more engaging hub than either Detroit or Hengsha, and the new augs and UI are so much better. Jensen can climb up ledges! And when he knocks people out, he (mostly) automatically hides the body near where he's standing, rather than his HR special of sending someone flying ten feet into the eyeline of cameras/turrets/guards/minigun robots.

Against that, the story is much less epic than HR's and the aug/racism thing feels a bit strained, like an SF version of Dragon Age's mages/racism parallel. The parallel doesn't entirely work if you keep having situations where your augmented people/wizards can go psycho/be possessed by devils at literally any moment. More interesting is the militarisation of the police and the line cops tow between being tools of the government and genuinely protecting the people, which was germane in 2016 but hits much harder in 2021.

I'm also not a huge fan of the binary choice in the midgame, which is very un-Deus Ex-ish. You should be able to do both missions, especially as the time constraints for one of the two missions is very artificial. There was actually a glitch that allowed you to do both (though the game didn't respond well to it, mainly assuming you did the heist), but it got patched out in a later DLC drop.

Something that's very interesting, as I'm paying more attention to it this time around, is the idea that Mankind Divided Jensen is:

Spoiler

either a clone of the original - unlikely given tech limitations in the DEX universe - or he's been reprogrammed at some point, probably by the Illuminati. The bit where you find what appear to be partial duplicates of Jensen in the bank raid mission is weird and creepy, especially since Jensen doesn't seem to react to them, like he's been programmed not to.

Of course, since no one bought it, likely the plot clues they left in the game will be ignored in any future game, which will likely be a total reboot.

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My PS4 died the other day. I was very sad, because while I would be more than happyu to use that as an excuse to get a PS5 earlier than I had planned, the problem is PS5s are rarer than COVID vaccines around these parts. So I was actually faced with having no movie/TV streaming device game console connected to my TV thereby incentivising my wife to purchase a smart TV, which would then make it extremely difficult to subsequently convince her that we need to get a PS5 "for the streaming access".

Fortunately I revived the PS4 by doing a hard system reinstall. I lost all game save data, but that was a relatively small price to pay.

 

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43 minutes ago, The Anti-Targ said:

My PS4 died the other day. I was very sad, because while I would be more than happyu to use that as an excuse to get a PS5 earlier than I had planned, the problem is PS5s are rarer than COVID vaccines around these parts. So I was actually faced with having no movie/TV streaming device game console connected to my TV thereby incentivising my wife to purchase a smart TV, which would then make it extremely difficult to subsequently convince her that we need to get a PS5 "for the streaming access".

Fortunately I revived the PS4 by doing a hard system reinstall. I lost all game save data, but that was a relatively small price to pay.

 

I’m glad this story had a relatively happy ending. 

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1 hour ago, The Anti-Targ said:

My PS4 died the other day. I was very sad, because while I would be more than happyu to use that as an excuse to get a PS5 earlier than I had planned, the problem is PS5s are rarer than COVID vaccines around these parts. So I was actually faced with having no movie/TV streaming device game console connected to my TV thereby incentivising my wife to purchase a smart TV, which would then make it extremely difficult to subsequently convince her that we need to get a PS5 "for the streaming access".

Fortunately I revived the PS4 by doing a hard system reinstall. I lost all game save data, but that was a relatively small price to pay.

 

What died, exactly? My concern is that the hard drive is failing and you're just going to run into the same problem when it tries to use the bad sector again. 

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54 minutes ago, RumHam said:

What died, exactly? My concern is that the hard drive is failing and you're just going to run into the same problem when it tries to use the bad sector again. 

This is the sort of thing that bums me out.  

My NES is 33 years old.  But as long as I keep an old tube TV with a coax input around… it works like new.

But I had a PS2 and a PS3 both die on me already and I worry the same will happen to my PS4.

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53 minutes ago, Rhom said:

My NES is 33 years old.

Were you one of those "The manual says not to blow in it!" guys? I had to replace the pin thingy in mine years ago. The funny thing is I'm not sure I've used it since. 

My first Xbox 360 died right after Halo 3 came out. My N64's power supply went once and my XBox One power supply recently died because it got clogged with cat hair and overheated. 

 

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8 hours ago, RumHam said:

What died, exactly? My concern is that the hard drive is failing and you're just going to run into the same problem when it tries to use the bad sector again. 

It's definitely a HDD issue. When it died what was happening is that the PS4 started scanning the HDD, like it does if you don't turn the PS4 off properly but it would only get to 38% and then it would say can't turn the PS4 on and says to do a reinstall. The console was doing some weird stuff aver the last 6 months or so. When I would turn it off properly a little while later it would turn itself on. On other occasions it would just turn off, like someone hit the power button in the middle of playing a game or watching TV. That random turning off would make the PS4 think it had been turned off wrong and it would go through the HDD scanning thing and give me a growling for not turning it off properly. So I guess the thing has  been wheezing away for a while now, and maybe I've just given it a short new lease on life. The HDD was pretty full and I was having to delete stuff sometimes just to download a game update. I guess I need to keep the HDD fairly empty to nurse it along until PS5's restock.

My PS2 and PS3 I gave to my brother when I upgraded. Can't remember if the PS2 is still functional, but the PS3 is just a big 'ol door stop now. I am sorta-kinda hoping that now Sony has slightly gotten over itself and is releasing some games on PC they will allow PS2 and PS3 emulators to be released on PCs and my old game collection will still have a purpose. Though that would mean having a Blu-ray drive in the PC, or an external one that can connector to it. Surely at some point PCs will be powerful enough to run a PS3 emulator / virtual PS3.

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11 hours ago, Rhom said:

This is the sort of thing that bums me out.  

My NES is 33 years old.  But as long as I keep an old tube TV with a coax input around… it works like new.

But I had a PS2 and a PS3 both die on me already and I worry the same will happen to my PS4.

Wow, that's unlucky.  I've got a launch PS2, launch PS3 (though I did replace the disc drive on that one), a PS3 slim that is our main blu-ray player, an XBOX, a 360, wii, and a launch PS4 that are all in working order.  I did get a YLOD PS3 once, but also fixed that and gave that to my brother years ago.  Biggest reason I keep so many games around is that my hardware can still play them.  Also a big reason I've never been sold on backwards compatibility as a "feature".

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