Reply With QuoteBeen playing Horizon Zero Dawn (Secret Santa gift) the last couple of days. It's decent open world fun, nothing too spectacular about the gameplay itself (fairly standard OW fare) but the robot dinosaur theme makes it worth my time.
Yup, we've arrived in 2023, which means it's time for a new thread. (The older ones can be found here: 2020, 2021 and 2022.)
So, what'll it be for 2023? In my case, I'm playing the very casual, visually gorgeous and rather sweet LEGO Builder's Journey, which was a recent Epic freebie. This may just be the game with ray-tracing that is the most visually striking: you practically feel like you can reach out and touch the blocks. It's a relatively short game AFAIK, which is also a good fit for the gameplay, but that's exactly what I'm looking for right now.
Been playing Horizon Zero Dawn (Secret Santa gift) the last couple of days. It's decent open world fun, nothing too spectacular about the gameplay itself (fairly standard OW fare) but the robot dinosaur theme makes it worth my time.
I started playing hardcore motocross sim MX Bikes. I am 3.5 hours in and just getting to the point where I can make it through a lap without falling off the bike. Here's a vid of someone who's played a whole lot more of it than I have:
(thanks for making a new thread, Thirith!)
also:
REQUESTING SPORTS STORY STATUS UPDATE from Aja and PigLick
I heard there was a patch. Is it GOOD now?
I've been playing Teardown, which is just too damn fun. Very interested to see all the cool mods that people have come up with, but for now the vanilla game is plenty good enough. Seems like the perfect game to play on my new Steam Deck. I feel like the missions could use a bit more variety though, its usually always "get these 4 things before the 1:00 timer is up." But I'm guessing the community mods will be a bit more creative.
As far as I know (from checking the dev's Twitter), the patch has been submitted but not approved, so I'm still waiting!Originally Posted by henke
Just now I'm playing The Pedestrian. The "real world" aesthetic is pretty slick. At its core it's a logic puzzle game with platform jumping. So there's not much to say about it, but as a puzzle game it's really good, which for the genre is saying something. It's managed to keep the puzzles fresh & keep me coming back to it.
I just played Lego Builder's Journey too, and already finished it as well. It's very short indeed. It started off as a fun little adventure, but as soon as the game started leaning too far towards the puzzle territory, I thought that it lost its charm. The endless factory levels just got too repetitive and boring, and the puzzles were sort of frustrating rather than challenging or rewarding. I would have preferred a more casual approach.
But yeah, it's very pretty.
Ah, right!
also from what I have played (waiting for patch also) I think they might have a bit too ambitious, it doesnt seem as focused as Golf Story, like trying to cram in all these wacky rpg quests and the like. Still the jury is out until I play more, and it was still good, plus the soundtrack is very nice.
Here's some what ifs: what if Halo 2, instead of going where it did, was a game that was almost entirely an expanded version of The Silent Cartographer? What if you gave Chief a grappling hook, explosive barrels, and the ability to negate fall damage by grappling the ground? What if you took even more elements of Just Cause and sprinkled them about the now suddenly open world, like propaganda towers and bases that need to be exploded? What if these felt fun initially, but soon gave way to that inevitable hollow feeling from a Ubisoft game? What if Marty O'Donnell never came back to score the game, and you got a few other composers, including the one who did the scores for the Ori games, and had them do Marty impressions instead of unleashing their potential?
What if you gave Halo fun combat, but stuck it in an open world that refuses to give way to a sense of wonder or discovery because your design makes everything visually pleasing at the outset, but drops away in a few hours into an over-arching set of similar objectives and map icon clearing missions that highlight how samey the world is? What if the sight of a sunset across the rim of your ringworld sending shadows across the mountaintops leaves you just a little bit cold, and you're left silently slinging yourself across giant columns of basalt towards some glowing science fiction monument girdling a valley? What if your villain's the most boring thing possible, a scenery-chewing ogre who monologues you to death at every occasion? What if the game killed your Windows assistant a few years ago, but has nothing to fill that void with now, so simply slots it back in with a facelift?
What if a game's haunted by the ghosts of its own past, subconsciously etching onto its landscapes the idea that its best days are behind it, but just can't bring itself to let go?
You get a pretty decent game, but also an alternately tepid and infuriating one. We don't need infinite Halos, just one that doesn't stick a plasma grenade on its own face. Potential is easy to see, but harder to realise. 6.5 exposition venus flytraps / 10.
Last edited by Sulphur; 5th Jan 2023 at 06:12.
New year, new games I bought on sale. First is Disco Elysium, which feels to me like Thomas Pynchon: The Game. I talked to my limbic system and my necktie, tried to be self-effacing about last night's blackout session, and, uh, found my other shoe. I decided to set the voiceover mode to psychological (characters only) because the narrator felt too slow, but I'm curious what others would recommend. It's already making me feel like an intellectual lightweight, but hey, what's an English degree for if not trying to understand literature that's too smart for you?
Second is Need for Speed Unbound, the relative opposite game. It's the first NFS I've played since Porsche Unleashed, and it's really scratching an itch. I like the the driving model with its hairtrigger drifting, the rain-soaked open world is pretty and feels alive and interesting to explore, and the story is silly but endearing in a Fast and the Furious (the original) sort of way. Great soundtrack, too, although being old I've never heard of any of it. It's also hard, but it pays out enough when you lose to make it worth your while, which lends it a sense of progression that's lacking in something like Forza Horizon. Recommended.
What do you mean "recommend"? You mean vis-a-vis the voiceover mode? I played the original which only had voiceovers for maybe the first three or four major dialog options of characters. So I couldn't say.
But I did notice they changed Cuno's voice so he's not so much of a comic book parody character. I didn't like the new voice... I mean if your character is defined by the catch phrase "Fuck does Cuno care?", parody is kind of part of the package to begin with. But apparently I'm in the minority, and most people like the realism, in the Reddit page anyway.
I did notice that people get really partisan in their opinions about this game generally though, which I guess makes sense, given that the whole game kind of revolves around partisanship. But it made me really like this game more for my personal experience with it, and not eager to read other people's opinions on it.
Yeah, I mean I started playing it and instantly wanted to turn off all voiceovers so that I could just read it at my own pace. But then I wondered if I’d miss out on some great performances, so I set it to the mode which silences the narrator and skills but leaves characters in. And yet it still feels kind of stilted, like this type of dialogue is meant to be read rather than spoken. It’s also odd that characters speak but you don’t, which gives it a one-sided feel. And I’d rather ask for experienced TTLG opinions on the matter than the Reddit stans.
I love the narrator voice though, even if it's a little slow. It's a game to take your time with anyway, so I was happy to just kinda treat it like an audiobook in that regard.
I decided to switch all voices back down and chill out, slow down. I love this game so far. I thought I’d have to internalize some racist ideology to get the racist to let me past the gate, but then I managed to pass an against-the-odds skill check to hop over a railing, which I did heroically.
I got started on Shadow of the Tomb Raider. I still don't give a damn about Lara in this particular incarnation (not sure I did in the others, but at least she had a personality), but of the reboot series this one definitely has the best graphics and environment, visually speaking. Expecting this to be okay rather than great, but that'll keep me engaged for a couple of weeks.
Gameplay wise, Shadow is the best of the reboot trilogy IMO.
Shadow's great for just fucking around in the jungle and enjoying the sights, IMO. It has the least amount of combat of the new trilogy, which was a breath of fresh air for me. The story's rubbish, the framework is still optional side-nonsense sprinkled all over the place, and the platforming is slightly more involved mechanically, but still has about a zero skill ceiling. Which is fine, I guess, because there are lots of tombs (if you have the DLCs), and they're pretty great. The puzzling is fine, and overall it's enjoyable even if I felt my enjoyment of the experience had somewhat deflated by the end.
Speaking of tombs, if you can co-op those with someone, I'd recommend it. Slight Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light vibes there when you have a buddy, which was rather nice.
I'm glad to hear it! Disco Elysium really is something special. It has flaws, severe flaws, but I devoutly hope other developers realize that RPGs don't have to be built around combat.
Thanks, I wasn't aware of this at all! If I ever read about it, I must've forgotten it entirely - which, considering the last couple of years, isn't altogether surprising.
heads up on Sports Story, its kinda shit. Patch aside it doesnt change the gameplay which is really just boring, the sports arent fleshed out and it all feels unfinished and disappointing. What a shame.
It was probably not a good sign when they released the game on Xmas eve without having sent out any advance review copies. Reviews have started coming in now in January, aaaaaand... they're not great. What a shame, indeed.
I got kind of a bad vibe from it in hour or so that I played it; not just bugs, but a confusing UI, unclear objectives, and unfocused writing. It felt like an early-access game. Maybe the dev will polish it over time. Im gonna hold off on it for now.
I've accumulated quite a list.
Hero of the Kingdom: Lost Tales 2: A soothing minimalistic RPG with a dash of hidden object hunting. You'd probably need mental quirks like mine to enjoy it, since everything has been stripped out except gathering/trading/expending resources.
Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion: A mediocre Zelda-style game that relies on its charm and humor, which I found lacking except for the fun running gag of document destruction.
Creeper World 4: Two thirds through, the game has repeated its predecessors' mistake of introducing a new enemy that can only be hurt by one building that can only hurt its one enemy. Then it did so again. "RTS versus sinister fluid dynamics" remains a solid concept, stop diluting it.
Xenoblade Chronicles: Having a JRPG in the background satisfies some deep emotional urge in me. I suppose it tricks my subconscious into feeling that I am growing steadily stronger. XC has fantastic world design and worldbuilding, taking place on the body of a defeated titan. The dialogue is subpar though, and the combat perhaps a bit too automated.
Pitcher and the Whale: A free Ludum Dare game about a fox trying to save a stranded whale by tossing water on him. In addition to platforming with the fox, you manage a bucket that bounces around like crazy, breaks rocks and stuns enemies. It took about ten minutes to finish, but those ten minutes were a joy.
Hardspace: Shipbreaker: I have an issue with dropped inputs which neither troubleshooting nor a new gamepad could resolve. Oh well, I had been on quite a long winning streak with Steam's Linux support. I'll play it on the PS5 when I finally buy one of those two or three years from now.
Tactical Nexus: The engine is dated and the pricing is silly, but otherwise this game, a set of optimization puzzles in the guise of an RPG, is fantastic. Doing well in these puzzles gives you permanent rewards on a metagame level, allowing you to choose various boosts on previous levels, thereby turning them into slightly different puzzles. I reinstalled this game after a long absence, and upon reviewing one of the levels I glimpsed an immense lattice inside my mind, a lattice that represented two months of obsessive play. I shut the game down in fear.
Now I'm playing Rain World.
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