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Deathloop (PC) by dkirschner (Mar 9th, 2023 at 07:43:38) |
Deathloop is stylish and creative. I've never played anything quite like it, part roguelike, part FPS, part Dishonored. You play as a guy named Colt. Colt is stuck in a loop, a la Russian Doll. When he dies, he wakes up on a beach on an island the next morning. There are four areas of the island, and Colt can visit one each part of the day (morning, noon, evening, and night), for a grand total of 16 permutations of time and place. What happens in one place at one time can affect other places at other times. Colt isn't stuck alone, though. He's part of some experimental utopia with other "Visionaries" who collectively founded this strange place and keep it running. Colt's goal? Kill all the other Visionaries in one day to break the loop and escape. The problem? Figuring out how to manipulate the Visionaries to go to various parts of the island at various times such that Colt can actually perform this feat. Even more complicated is that Colt is constantly harassed and hunted by a woman named Julianne. There's fun story to uncover, and I won't say any more about it!
Moment-to-moment gameplay feels like a more gun-focused Dishonored, but there's larger strategy to it involving the loop. See, when you die or the day resets, you lose your guns, slabs (powers, like in Dishonored), and weapon and personal modifications. You also lose your "Residuum," which is like the substance that makes the loop tick. You use Residuum to "infuse" items and make them permanently available. Found a badass gun? Infuse it so you have it for all loops going forward. If you don't, it's gone on the next loop. There are some fun weapons to find, especially the quest-related ones, like the laser gun that melts enemies or the sniper rifle that blows them up. My favorite gun was a pretty plain silenced SMG. Silence is your friend. I put accuracy modifications on it and could quietly headshot someone as far away as with a regular sniper rifle. By the end, I was also carrying a special sniper rifle with strong zoom and a humongous machine gun that got more accurate the longer I held down the trigger for those up-close-and-personal moments. I used two slabs for most of the game, one that makes you temporarily invisible and another that lets you teleport. Each slab has various modifications as well, but I didn’t bother much with modifications for anything. My third favorite slab was the one that “links” enemies, so what happens to one happens to all nearby. I preferred the stealthy, silent approach in Deathloop.
This is what Deathloop boils down to. Choose where to go at different points of time on the island, infuse items to become more powerful, follow story leads to learn how to kill all the Visionaries in one loop, and eventually break the loop. I was mesmerized by this until I started running out of leads to follow. At some point, there becomes little to do besides follow one or two leads, which means you’ll be skipping through parts of the day, trying and retrying to accomplish one task. For example, the part I died on the most was one part of the island at night when one Visionary throws a party and another attends. The objective is to find a way to identify the host. The party attendees are wearing wolf masks and are indistinguishable from one another, so you have to lure him out. I had already killed him two or three times, but I wasn’t killing him the exact way that the game wanted me to. This resulted in a few hours of me looping just to get to this part of the island at night, playing detective in his mansion trying to figure out what I needed to do, then actually executing the plan. And it turns out this is the ultimate murder in the day. Once you set everything up, there will actually be four Visionaries present on that part of the island at night. Goons everywhere, lots of ways to die. Oh yeah, speaking of death, you can die twice each part of the day and resurrect before the loop resets. This is because Colt has a special slab with this ability. I appreciated this forgiveness.
So, overall, I enjoyed Deathloop, especially its creative take on roguelikes. But, it still didn’t avoid some pitfalls of the genre, which are repetitive runs with no real change in between. Luckily though, the repetitive runs come at the end when you are down to just a couple leads, and they’ll be over quickly enough. I’ll miss hearing Colt and Julianna bicker over walkie talkies; the voice acting and writing were top notch!
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Wolfenstein: Youngblood (PS4) by jp (Mar 7th, 2023 at 11:13:06) |
I was looking for a "mindless" shooter to pass the time - and I thought, ooh, this should fit the bill! And it does, but it also did not.
I hadn't realized that this is a two-player game! (the 2nd player is an AI if you're not playing online or with other people) It's got all the crazy that the Wolfenstein games now have - the WWII was lost to the nazis and so on...and here you play as "Duke Nukem" (BJ Blaskowicz?)'s daughters - or something like that. And they're both all gung-ho and trigger happy like their dad. There's some sort of resistance, they get involved, it was all a bit confusing but they end up in Paris and there's shooting, and - for the level I played - a giant zeppelin.
I was having fun - but the game's difficulty curve was surprisingly uneven - it was all easy peasy fun and then - I died 10 times - and then it was easy peasy fun again, and then died a bunch of times. I'm not quite sure what it is - either my tactical approach is bad (but works with weak enemies when it shouldn't) or certain enemies are just an order of magnitude harder to deal with - or, there's some thing I should be doing but I'm not (e.g. use a weapon a certain way, etc.).
The game also has a whole perk economy and weapon upgrade econonomy that triggers more perks and stuff...and it all felt a bit TOO much data for what I was looking for - just shoot stuff and have fun.
Maybe I'm just a bit annoyed because I was required to sign up for an online account I don't want or need? The longer I think about it the more this feels like a "dark pattern". The back of the box does say that a Bethesda account is necessary to access certain features - but my recollection is that you can't play the game at all without access. So, perhaps all you can see/do is look at stuff in the menus?
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Nitro+ Blasterz: Heroines of Infinite Duel (PS4) by jp (Mar 6th, 2023 at 19:26:21) |
I rarely play fighting games for fun, but I've always been curious to see what's going on in the genre. And, I think I hit "gold" with this game - bought completely blind.
It's a fighting game featuring only female-presenting characters. A bunch of them, I didn't count nor did I bother to unlock a bunch of ones presumably also available for play. As far as I can tell, and I did play around with a four or five of them, they're all strange/weird in what seem to me unconventional ways. For example, one of the characters is a "cat lady" - by this I mean that the character has lots of cats as pets and that the attacks are mostly done vie the cats rather than the character herself. All of the buttons work just as they do for other characters - it's the animations that are different (as far as I can tell), and funny.
I played a few campaign runs with the characters- just to see what was going on and how the game worked. As expected the difficulty ramps up but I was able to make progress despite my meagre skills. I then realized that there's an option to alter the difficulty (10 different options if I recall) so I played on the easiest just to see how the campaigns ended and what happened.
Also, perhaps more importantly for me - the game has a crazy story that I was not able to make any sense of other than it being heavily HP Lovecraft inspired, but modern sci-fi with magic and...well, lots of nonsense to be honest. I was surprised by how much story there is - visual novel style presentation, lots of screens and so on. Like, LOTS of reading.
Once you finish the campaign, you unlock a NEW campaign - and this is where the reading/visual novel stuff goes all-in! Like I said, it really made very little sense to me - there's the necronomicon, there's demons, and so on. But all in the context of cute sexy female characters. But, the game's rated T (teen), so it's not really creepy in that sense.But still, I keep going back to the fighting game thing and here's an example with all female characters. But, who are they for? (I'm thinking representation - is this a game for boys/men as the intended audience?) I don't really know - but the game's lore heavily suggests that the characters are all from different places (other games I presume) and that they've sort of come together here in a special game - with the story even playing with the cross-over idea (and how they're all trapped in the game just for you to play/mess around).
Anyways, I don't have much to say about the gameplay because - well, I didn't explore it all that deeply - there's counters and stuff. Super bars AND two teammates that can tag in for an attack. The games tutorial features are good enough for me - but, like I said, I don't play fighting games for fun personally, so I wasn't particularly interested or motivated in learning all the characters (though I did try to do some cool stuff with one at least).
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Marvel's Iron Man VR (PS4) by jp (Mar 2nd, 2023 at 12:52:20) |
Wow, they really nailed the (imagined) experience of being Iron Man as seen in the movies. You basically do a similar thing with your hands to what Iron Man does to hover, fly around, attack and more. You have to use the PS Move controllers (the "lollipop" ones) - and I have a hard time remembering to charge - and keep them charge (I charge everything off the PS4, so I can only charge one things at a time).
The game is definitely more tiring for me to play than other PSVR games I've been playing recently - I think it's mostly because there's more hand movements and more turning around and stuff. I almost want to say I also lean forward and back as Iron Man but that is probably just the natural response (that has a name, but I'm forgetting it - e.g. same as when you lean over when playing a driving game)
I appreciated the narrative parts of the game - but there's a lot more of them than what I expected and they're also a lot longer than what I expected. To the point I was starting to feel tired just from standing there listening to the characters chit chat and stuff. There's also more depth to the game's systems and mechanics than I expected - more than I was willing to engage/indulge in - mostly for time rather than interest.
Is the game any fun? Well, it nails the Iron Man experience and can feel quite exhilarating at times - for all the good reasons. So, yes - definitely an good example of using VR in smart ways - I guess the more I think about it, the more I realize that I really wanted to just play missions and not have (most) of the story stuff - which I get is important, but also felt it was less interesting and tiring?
I think I played 3 campaign missions? (before deciding to shelve the game). I didn't get to experience the full depth of the upgrade and options system - but that's ok.
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Resogun (PC) by dkirschner (Mar 1st, 2023 at 16:34:41) |
Resogun is an old PS4 launch game, a side-scrolling bullet hell kind of thing. It has the unique twist of being played on...a cylinder. Like, you can move left and right, but it's not across flat space; it's around a cylinder, so the level spins as you move. It's neat.
Anyway, it's real simple, so this will be real short. There are 5 levels, each with three phases ending in a boss fight. Enemies spawn all around the cylinder and try to kill you. You kill them instead and avoid the dozens of bullets they shoot at you. In the story, they're aliens trying to kill humans or something, so you can rescue some humans along the way. Drop them off at special places to get points or shields or some other perk. You can also pick up a few weapon upgrades per level.
You can boost (go really fast and slam through obstacles), set off a bomb (kills everything on screen), or use one other special move (blasts a giant gun). These have limited uses. You also have a set number of lives, and if you lose them, you start the level over. I found Resogun to be fast and fun, with a pumping soundtrack. It also gets really hard by level 5 on normal (I finished the last level on easy), and I can't imagine getting that far on a harder difficulty. It's super short and certainly meant for replayability. But there are more interesting games of this type out there!
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Grand Theft Auto - San Andreas (PS2) by Denn |
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most recent entry: Thursday 21 February, 2008
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Gamelog Entry 2
GAMEPLAY:
Overall Grand Theft Auto San Andreas is a pretty fun game. First of all there is the fact that there is so much that the character can do. Since the character can pretty much ignore the missions in the game, the player is free to explore the game world (or the city at least). Interesting enough the player can affect the character’s appearance through in game decisions, such as going to a barber shop and getting a new hair cut or getting some new clothes.
The game still keeps to its roots however. The player can still go on a rampage across the city with an assortment of weapons, jack cars, and have a fun chase with the police. I have to say that the real fun of Grand Theft Auto San Andreas comes out when the player is chased by the police. It’s interesting to see how high the player can get their wanted rating and how long they can survive in such an environment.
DESIGN:
The game designers really planned the entire game out well. First of all you have three cities to play in, and each city then has its own network of streets, shops, special locations, and npcs. This makes the game world feel much wider/freer than the previous GTA games. Each city also had it’s own distinctive style and feel. For example the city of Los Santos features many of the landmarks found in real life Los Angles. In addition the designers also made it so that the player actually had to travel between the cities through the country side as opposed to simply make it so that the player automatically appears in the other city. This further reinforces the sense of being in a wide game world.
I also found the way the designers tried to motivate the players interesting. In order to motivate players into actually following the storyline and completing the main missions, the designers made it so that after most missions the player is able to unlock something or get a new item. For example the player at the start of the game cannot leave Los Santos and head off to any of the other cities. In order to unlock those cities the player has to finish at least the main missions. This solves the problem of players ignoring the storyline and goofing off. Sure, the player can still go off and do whatever he/she wants to do, but sooner or later they will get tired to running around the same city and will want to head to another city. That’s when the reward system kicks in, forcing the player to do the missions in order to unlock the other cities.
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