- 0 Posts
- 40 Comments
I’m looking up the opening scene for Rise of the Tomb Raider and I can’t find the therapy session itself. Maybe it was only in the trailer and they cut it from the game, I remember people thought it was weird when they released that trailer because it was unexpected at the time that this was the direction they were taking? But the game does have you find tapes of Lara’s recorded sessions talking with the therapist, like how she’s having control issues and it turns out she has become a different person in a bad way.
The third game of the reboot trilogy starts with her tracking this evil organization that’s been screwing with her family, finding the item they’re trying to steal to trigger an appocalypse, stealing it first, and almost triggering that same apocalypse because she doesn’t know what she’s doing, thinking she’s doing good. Second game also started with her tracking the same organization to figure out what they’re doing, and from that, she stumbles into some archaeology. It’s a long character arc, she was looking for unrelated answers, but she learns that she can be good at figuring out ancient stuff, and she finds out the hard way that she can also fuck up badly when she doesn’t know what she’s doing. It’s supposed to end at the point where she’s mature enough to do better. We just see all the “fucking up” parts.
Git gud or leave but no complaining allowed okay bud. No, the difficulty being too high is not a different complaint, it’s exactly what we’re talking about. The AI, the room setups and somehow every bug being placed exactly where you’re jumping, the runbacks, getting killed in 3 hits half of the time even though you have 5 HP, getting juggled to death into a spike trap or lava as soon as the first hit despite requiring 3 hits to die despite having 5 HP, getting hit when you’re healing and losing all of it, every single stupidest bug requiring at least 2 or 3 hits to kill and somehow up to 6 or 8 for the bigger ones when they all dodge everything and you have garbage range, anything that flies especially, constant pixel perfect coordination in your jumps, the need to be alert 100% of the time between environment traps and enemies and always have the perfect speedrun strat, on top of the resource management, this is all one complaint. It’s artificially way too hard and there is zero learning curve and no way to tune it down, and it would be less of a problem if you didn’t lose all the resources you were collecting for an hour of doing that loop. Take off some of those or loosen some positioning and it’s already much less stressful - literally any one mod is a big help already (no 2HP damage, respawn near your coccoon…) It’s ruthless, it allows zero second of paying a little less attention, it’s on purpose, and it is not the player’s fault for not running back to a string station that is not marked anywhere. This is not a healthy game to play, and it shouldn’t be justified by saying it’s for players who want to get very good at every single screen of it and no one else.
You want to buy Shakra’s map? Too bad, that room is empty now for some reason, and you have no idea where to find the map now, you don’t know Shakra comes back to the shop area and can be called with that ring, and since you HAVE NO MAP you don’t even know where to go at all anyway. Benches and bellways, same, you CAN’T GO BACK or safely rest and create a checkpoint until you have the funds to even unlock them, at which point getting your beads stringed becomes useless because you just spent them. See that mask shard and/or the simple key and you think it’d be nice to buy in your first couple hours? Your fault for not wanting to keep going back and forth between the docks and the shop to make a string, on top of going back and forth to the farming room for an hour at 5 to 15 beads per run in lava for the Deep Docks, so that’s 500 rosaries gone the second time in a row some stupid bug won’t get out of the way but also reads your every input to dodge every single time you even look at them. And even the first time you die, if you had no bench close by and no map, good luck even getting your coccoon back. What I’ve learned is to completely ignore those big stashes and strings of free rosaries because it’s all bait that you’ll lose in a minute and then permanently the next minute (that Greymoor bird house trap and Moorwing are NOT in the refund window). And learning that didn’t make the experience any better. That’s the difficulty problem we’re talking about, these are not two separate things, it’s literally the whole game. On its own, dying repeatedly is not such a big deal if all you have to do is redo that one jump or even that one series of 15 perfect jumps (fucking Karnak), other Metroidvanias do that too and they’re not awful. It’s everything around it and the permanent pressure.
This game’s trap is that people who played the newer Metroid or Prince of Persia think dying repeatedly in a lengthy, very hard bounce-and-dash maze is not a huge deal breaker even if this one ramps it up to “every screen is a constant challenge”, but they don’t know they should also have played Dark Souls and some other roguelikes first.
Not a lot of those in a 5 screen run back, I just need one more try to kill that boss anyway, I swear. Oh shit, it has another move shit he’s juggling 3 HP off me at once aaaand I’m dead again.
And that’s not counting the unexpected “oops you’re locked now, fight these 5 waves of enemies, also your coccoon is locked in that room too, good luck getting your shit back” on your way to anywhere. If that’s your first time playing the game, it takes a bit to pick up on how cruel the game is and to start thinking about how to handle that. I’m not talking about people who already know the game here. That’s not on me, no.
Ace Attorney seems complete, including the Investigations and Great spin-offs. Mega Man collection apparently doesn’t have Mega Man 11 (last entry in the OG series) and the bundle doesn’t have the Zero series (4 games), the ZX series (2 games), and the Star Force series (3 games). There’s a separate collection for the Zero series, and maybe the ZX series too. I don’t know about Star Force. Also no Mega Man Legend 1 & 2, no Mega Man X Command Mission, Mega Man Power Battle, but those are different types of games, not the classic 2D platformers. No Zero and ZX is quite a miss though.
“Clair Obscur is the franchise name,” says Broche. “Expedition 33 is one of the stories that we want to tell in this franchise. Exactly what it will look like and what the concept will be is still too soon to announce, but what is sure is that this is not the end of the Clair Obscur franchise.”
Looking forward to Clair Obscur: December 33 for whatever is going on with the Writers.
Both arms was my first take too considering he’s specifically named the one winged angel because of the one black wing replacing his arm, but he does have a whole extra head visible behind the text, in the same way Bizarro Sephiroth had a big Sephiroth and then a tiny Sephiroth on top - the topless, black wing form sits on a cloud that sits on top of another bigger Sephiroth with white wings instead of just having 6 wings replacing his legs. And there’s still more werid shit going on behind that text that I can’t make out. With how they brought Bizarro Sephiroth in Rebirth, they could be doing the “multiple teams attacking different sections” take again.
but an “outsider” earning the highest title a normal person can earn in feudal japan seems very outlandish.
William Adams was specifically known to have been granted the title of samurai by Tokugawa Ieyasu, and that’s precisely in the period immediately at the end of the Sengoku where the title of samurai begins to change as a status (in the sense of being more restricted and codified). And there’s zero way that “public pressure” would have pushed Oda Nobunaga to change shit about something he decided to like, he’s the last guy of that era on which public pressure did anything. No one from Oda’s circle would have called him out on that.
Again, a samurai wasn’t necessarily “at the top of social order”, there are places where ashigaru, the lowest rung on the ladder, were called samurai. It’s a misconception.
As for chosing an actual Japanese person from the time - there is a second playable character who is the fictional daughter of one of those famous real people from that time and an actual ninja from Iga. You play as her for the first 10 hours or so before Yasuke even becomes playable (except for the introduction mission). This argument is ridiculous and just plain bad faith.
Not necessarily - not everyone who fought was a samurai, just as not everyone who fought in medieval europe was a knight. However, I do agree that the definition is not entirely strict.
Yes, not necessarily, but that’s the thing - the people who claim he couldn’t be a samurai because he didn’t have such or such are making up requirements that didn’t exist at that time. We don’t know if he was called one or not because we don’t have records about him from the people who might have had something to say.
We do have accounts that Nobunaga was impressed with his strength, made him test fight multiple people in shows of strength, gifted him a sword (which is kind of a big deal), and that he was captured by Akechi (and then freed) when he was trying to defend Nobunaga at Honnouji. He might have been just a bodyguard, yes, but even if he was, we don’t know if Nobunaga was calling him a samurai or not, because being a samurai wasn’t a rank or a title. Maybe a bodyguard could be called a samurai depending on how important and trusted he was, and Yasuke was trusted by Nobunaga. My point is that the people dismissing the samurai title are doing so based on a wrong premise - and we have no account that could be relevant in proving it right or wrong.
He was doing actual fighting, there are records of this happening, at least one confirmed battle happened in 1582 when nobunaga was betrayed by mitsuhide. There’s no doubt about that.
Yeah, that’s the one we know about, the Honnouji attack. I mean we don’t know if he took active part in large scale battles like the Tenshou Iga war doing more than standing around Nobunaga, which is depicted in the game with him leading charge - but that can be easily counted as creative liberty. Honnouji was a surprise attack on a temple, not a battlefield, so naturally, anyone caught in it would be fighting, especially a bodyguard.
Mori Ranmaru, Oda’s other famous fuckboy bodyguard who was also at Honnouji, was a samurai because of his family and was also mostly a close bodyguard, I don’t think he’s recorded as having actively participated in any battle either. And apparently he didn’t even have any land to his name beside his family, either, but he’s still clearly called a samurai.
Except there’s no clear cut definition of a samurai like that in that period. The class definition wasn’t that strict for most of Japan’s history, including the sengoku period - even ashigaru were considered samurai in some places.
Yasuke was a professional warrior (almost certainly more than just a regular ashigaru) who fought as a retainer of the Oda clan, that’s a samurai. And we’re pretty sure he did actual fighting, we just don’t know if he was in full armor and everything.
The daimyo is the one who owns the land and gives it to his retainers as he wants, samurais don’t automatically own land by definition.
To be fair, it was envisioned as multiplayer from the start, then dialed down and “settling” with HZD, then tried again before HFW and into the one with the 3D headset (mountain call or something?) and they kept saying they’d get to that original plan eventually. Does the Lego Horizon game have any of it? I want to believe the success of HZD and HFW as single-player helped them give that up in the end.
I don’t know about Xbox but I’m still seeing reports about PS5 games being optimized for the physical architecture and requiring some degree of overhaul for the PC port; even FF7Remake on PS4 talked about it for the PC port. Though I imagine that only applies to specific high end games, not for 99.99% of games. Just put it on Java or Unreal 4.
Rebirth is already out, but it’s still exclusive to the PS5. The PC port was announced for early 2025 I think. so OP is either making a jab at Rebirth not being available on PC because PC players hate exclusives, or they’re just saying they’re waiting for the 3rd part of the remake trilogy (probably to be expected some time in 2027), which is what a number of players are doing.
Exactly, they announced earlier this year that they were working on reviving a bunch of licences, including Crazy Taxi, Jet Set Radio, Shinobi, Golden Axe, Streets of Rage, and hinting at a longer list. We don’t know yet eactly how many titles that includes, and which of them will get remakes, remasters, or brand new games, but it was hinting brand new. Early dev footage was leaked at some point for Crazy Taxi and Shinobi.
I can’t believe we haven’t learned anything since “it’s about ethics in games journalism”. “It’s about monetization in AAA games” now, apparently.
I totally agree that there has been a hate campaign about DEI right-wing complains, but there’s two subjects that came to head at the same time here because it was on the same big title:
Star Wars Outlaw and AC Shadows had the same business model, Star Wars showed that it failed, and Ubisoft got spooked and said they’d have another look at the monetization model for AC. People did get pissed at both games when their business models with passes and editions everywhere were revealed.
It’s just that AC also had at the same time the matter of racist and misogynist hate because of the protagonists. I don’t think this happened on Star Wars, and the fact that it failed too shows that it isn’t the only complain people are having against Ubisoft.
Apparently the monetization guy is stepping on the minority hate campaign subject, he’s the one conflating the two problems here just because his job title. We shouldn’t forget that Ubisoft did pull an infuriating and deplorable stunt with that monetization model.
I’m on the side that a remaster of a PS4 gen game dumb, but HZD was always the butt of the joke in regard to those awful generic bobblehead animations during every single dialog. It was laughably bad. With the reveal trailer, it does make a pretty big difference. Everything else? Not so much.
If this had been a PC game all along, these animation overhaul would have been a patch of the original game, but since the trailer insists that they re-recorded all motion captures for the dialogs of the whole game, they get to sell it full price again.
Sales expectations here don’t mean “we think this game is so good it will move x million units,” that thinking doesn’t exist anymore. It starts from the money they put in it, and they deduce “we’ll need to sell x million copies to get the money back with the profit we want.” There have been a few interviews specifically about these two games saying that.
It’s the same old idea that AAA products (movies, games, same excuse) cost more to make than they bring money back - although we never know exactly how much of that is actually “investors expect an x% return by week y” where x is just too high and y too short and they never want to think longer term, and we never know how far an investment actually goes. Especially in the case of the Remake trilogy where keeping the same engine and world is supposed to drastically reduce the cost of the last game compared to if they had started a new game from scratch with the same content - except part 3 is unlikely to sell more than part 2 given that it’s a sequel.
At any rate, we all know it’s true that development time and costs keep going up exponentially, and no one likes it (and yet everyone wants 4k 60fps somehow).
There’s giving a different importance to something that is, in fact, present in the art piece because it touches you more importantly than it did the author, and then there’s making shit up whole cloth. But like I said, the words you chose, and also the things you chose to defend, say more about you than the art
You can also replace woke with another word and it is indeed true that this hypothetical game has a message of female empowerment by having a strong female lead yes. Fallout can have an anti-capitalist message whether you’re pro or anti capitalist yourself and use your own word of choice to denigrate or praise the message. The word you chose says more about you than the message.
What was your point already?
I’ve been playing the series since LttP. Twilight Princess is my top, for presentation and storytelling.
I feel like Skyward Sword tried to repeat that, but the dungeons and style / atmosphere of the world of TP still come out on top (even though I’m not very much into gothic style and furries). I think SS is way too cartoonish and happy-go-lucky for a world where the surface has been abandoned to the demons and yet everyone who lives there is cool (gorons, kiwis, moles, proto-Zora), that’s a massive tonal dissonance between the narration and the actual environment and it just takes me out.
The next ones on my top list are Minish Cap and Link Between Worlds.
I know what you mean, but Nintendo is a pretty bad example to illustrate that sentiment. I mean, they totally do corporate crap to benefit them and not the players obviously, but the Zelda series is literally built around the gimmicks of the console. They start thinking about a gimmick, either on the console and / or how to turn that into a gameplay gimmick, and then they make a Zelda game around that. OoT had the rumble pack and then tried to do Ura Zelda that was supposed to be the system seller for the DD64 - but that blew up and was salvaged between Master Mode and Majora’s Mask. The GameCube had Four Swords with the connection to the GBA and the multiplayer. The Wii had Skyward Sword with the motion thing, the Wii U had the separate tablet. The DS then the 3DS weren’t too relevant for Zelda but they tried, and other games did rely on it.
I’m not saying it’s a fact for the whole series, but Nintendo is particularly famous for developing a gimmick console and then building games around that, so yes, the physical console is actually relevant to the game you want to play it on, you’d be hard pressed to port that elsewhere and emulators are always weird and have a lot of work to adapt into something that makes sense on a single screen with a basic gamepad.
I think the writers pretty much admitted they had no plan for Trinity, seeing how their goal completely changed from immortality to apocalypse between Rise and Shadow. They were just the reason for Lara to track them across the world and stumble on ancient stuff.