lime!
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uncharted is the worst for this because the fights add basically nothing. the games are great humourous adventure serials occasionally broken up by obligatory murderous rampages. after my first playthrough of uncharted 2 it showed that i had done over 200 headshots alone. friend of mine had something like 1500.
i played and loved all the myst games, including uru live. i was really excited for neyyah, followed development for years. think i’m a third of the way through now, going by achievements.
so far, it feels like what people who don’t like myst think people enjoy about myst. it’s beautiful, densely detalied, and impenetrable . it starts with a five minute lore dump (cut down from fifteen in the demo, the dev was really proud of having “streamlined” the experience), there’s a new made-up word introduced every sentence (don’t worry, you get a glossary), and all the puzzles so far have been “align these in order” or “put the square thing in the square hole”.
puzzles are sort of integrated into the world like in riven, but in a weird haphazard way where there are random screens placed in the world. there are encoded notes everywhere, and they’re unreadable unless you “know the trick”, which you learn fairly quickly and after that they all become plaintext instantly. which is just as well because most of them are just fluff.
there are hints at interesting mechanics but i’ve not gotten there yet, the biggest change so far is getting a briefcase full of balls that activate machines. the balls are one-time use and uniquely coded so once you put the right ball in a machine it stays on and you no longer have that ball. it’s basically a series of fetch quests but you get all the items at once and have to just go around and put them in the right place.
all in all, a strange experience. i’m holding off on final judgement but so far i’m only impressed by the graphics. i’m hoping the story finds its footing soon because my patience with the glossary is starting to wear thin.
i always see this “you can control it” thing but nobody talks about how your ability to control the rng is dependent on the rng to unlock. it took 15 hours for me to see a single thing that allowed me to change probabilities, and by that point i had already rolled credits. i didn’t get basement access until day 40. the rng really fucked with me, until i gave up. at that point i had 6 start money, and no extra start steps. i didn’t know that was in the game. it wasn’t that i missed stuff either, i solved every puzzle i got clues for, if the rng allowed it.
that’s why i linked the article! the bulk of it is about limes. they did animal testing in the 1920s (before the discovery of vitamin C) and found that
- lime juice is about 25% as effective as lemon juice at preventing scurvy, when fresh, and
- its efficacy was reduced by being in contact with a) air and b) copper, which means the open-face copper tanks used to store the stuff at sea was… not well thought out.
basically, as it was used by the british navy it was completely useless.
oh they failed for a whole myriad of reasons, but scurvy was one of them.
hell no i wanna live
fruit juice is all mostly apple anyway
bonus fun fact, lime doesn’t help against scurvy. the brits started cultivating limes because it’s easier than lemons, but because the steam ship took over at around the same time, travel times got shorter and nobody noticed that they don’t actually have the same effect. until the 1910 british antarctic expedition when people’s teeth started falling out despite carrying tonnes of limes
when i first tried it, the plan which they had just scrapped was to have the biomes and general features be static but the details be procedural. so the skin of each part of the map was changeable. this was after the seamoth but long before the cyclops, when all the upgrade parts were untextured safes and all the biomes had not been added yet. there was one corner of the map that was just flat.
at that point they still had terraforming stuff. in fact that’s how i first explored the big hollow trunk in the plate coral forest biome: i blew the top off. i don’t remember if i went there right after the update that added the biome or had to wait for a month, because at some point in the development you couldn’t even look at that part of the map without fps dropping down to fractions. i think they forgot to use instancing so each model used its own drawcall, and there are thousands of them in that area.
they haven’t increased because the cost of production has drastically dropped. cartridges were expensive as hell to make; the hardware was like half to cost of the game. disks were cheaper but you still had all the extras like bespoke formats, copy protection and manuals. with digital distribution, the production cost is zero. even when you buy a physical release, you get an empty box with an off-the-shelf bluray.
i think the comment was more on how they started designing the game with terraformning as a central conceit and a randomly-generated voxel world, then scrapped all that when it was too late to pull it out of the game. so the world is still procedural and fully destructible, but the random seed is static and there is nothing left in the game that damages terrain.
the game would have been better if they took the combat out entirely, save for some one-on-one fights. it’s a shame that they’re done with the series, it was finally approaching “playable indy film” territory.
the achievement means they knew, and put the monster closet shit in anyway.