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Mar 22nd, 2020 at 12:26:00 - Simulacra (PC) |
Played in one sitting this morning/afternoon. Simulacra is billed as a horror game, but I would give it a 1.5 on the scary scale out of 10. This is an example of a niche game on Steam. It has an Overwhelmingly Positive score. Basically, people who love this specific kind of thing played it and rated it perfectly, and people who don't play these types of games didn't pick it up. I know I got it for free somewhere, maybe Humble Bundle. I would give it a decent score, between a 6-7 out of 10. I enjoyed some aspects of it and didn't like others.
Enjoyed
- The entire game takes place in a phone and its apps.
- The premise of the game is neat. You find a phone on your doorstep, open it up, and it is the phone of a missing woman. You dig around, talk to her contacts, try to figure out what happened to her.
- The UI is really well done. Navigating around the phone is simple and fun.
- The Taylor actor. That guy has some charm! The other actors are not great, but do a serviceable job. Greg is over-the-top fratty/douchebaggy and it's sort of funny, if only he wasn't such an awful person.
- Reminded me of the other similar "in the phone/internet/video" games I've played like Her Story and Orwell.
- The player-character's dialogue choices are all over the place. I did like, usually, how you are given the option to be a sarcastic ass back to Greg and other shitty characters. Pissing Greg off was perhaps my favorite thing to do in the game.
Didn't Enjoy
- The narrative loses me when the supernatural (super-digital?) comes into play. I think it would have been better if this was just a mystery/thriller game than trying to inject horror.
- Typos, typos, typos. Some of this was no doubt the writers' attempt to emulate written communication, but...just spell things correctly, please.
- My sociology professor gut tells me that the devs are/were undergrads exposed to a Baudrillard reading in class and it blew their minds.
- Greg yelling at me. I felt the verbal abuse.
- Attempts to deal with abuse/sexual harassment could have been done better. Their inclusion is laudable, but the numerous option that the player-character has to dismiss, downplay, or make jokes out of abuse and harassment are concerning.
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Mar 22nd, 2020 at 12:11:50 - Earthbound (PC) |
Just gonna close this...I had been playing this on an emulator at my girlfriend's house on her brother's old PC on and off for over a year. I go way too long between sessions and always forget what I'm doing. Plus, the emulator controls are not as good as an SNES. I enjoy the game. It's silly and quirky. Combat and stuff is really basic old-school JRPG stuff. I get why people love the game and why it's a classic. I made it to Threeve (the ghost/zombie infested town), poked around there today, died a lot. I got frustrated because there are so many random items and I don't know what they do. At this point, I'm only playing it because I feel like I should, anyway. I fear I will give the same treatment to Chrono Trigger...
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Mar 21st, 2020 at 18:06:06 - Outlast 2 (PC) |
I did not enjoy this as much as the first game. The story was worse / more convoluted, and the perpetual darkness and looking through night vision on your camera got real old. Does the game succeed at being scary? Yeah, I jumped a few times. Gross? Yeah, it's bloody disgusting. This is the only game I've ever played where the player-character endures a crucifixion AND the only game I've ever played where you witness a birth. I mean WITNESS. You see everything. Outlast 2 is not afraid to punish the human body.
You're a journalist, just like in the first game, whose helicopter crash lands in rural Arizona. Somehow, a crazy huge Christian cult exists here that has murdered thousands of their own people. Everyone lives in squalor, is disease-ridden, and very, very religious. You spend the game tracking down your pregnant wife (also on the helicopter), whom the cult wants to sever from her baby (the antichrist), kill them both, and eat you because you are their new messiah. It doesn't make a lick of sense.
There is a parallel narrative from the protagonist's past which, I assume, much of the present is something of a metaphor for. Basically, he feels responsible for a former classmate being assaulted by a teacher. Catholic guilt is real. This causes him to, in these stressful times, slowly lose his mind.
For gameplay, you just run and point your camera. There is some light platforming later on (walking across thin beams, jumping across gaps). You're generally doing these few things in pitch black darkness, so you need to use your camera's night vision. This requires batteries, so don't use it too much or you'll run out and I have no idea how you could possibly play this game without night vision.
Stupid fanatical cultists are patrolling everywhere. They'll chase and kill you if they spot you. I spent the first half of the game sneaking around, trying to stay in cover, watching their movement patterns. In the second half of the game, I just started sprinting through entire villages toward the well-sign-posted (always with a light) next area. This was much more efficient and made it so I didn't have to listen to the inane ramblings of the cultists.
You can also turn on your camera's mic, which detects sound, but this mechanic is inessential. I'm glad I will never hear these characters again. The game was tense enough, really dark, and the story pushed a lot of edgy buttons. It felt over the top in a bad way. Glad it's over!
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Mar 12th, 2020 at 22:58:33 - Super Mario 3D World (WiiU) |
Simple co-op Mario game. It's Super Mario Galaxy Lite. As a single-player experience, it becomes repetitive and grindy. At various points, you need more stars to progress, which is typical of these games. Usually, though, you have them through the regular course of play. This time, I was locked out from the next-to-last stage and had to grind 10 or so stars. I got what I thought was a lot from the last world and was locked out again. I needed 14 more (each stage has 3, so 14 is a lot, assuming that i got 1-2 on average per stage already). Don't tell anyone, but I just watched the last boss on YouTube. Grinding out another 14 stars would have taken a whole evening to do, and I was over this already, actually thought I would beat it last night. Then there was another world; tonight there was anotherrrr secret world. It dragged. Hard.
The game is charming and cute. The four characters each have different running speeds and jumping patterns. The gimmick is that they turn into cats. Like I said, cute. Some of the stages' mechanics were especially fun or clever, like the stage where you equip a flashlight and burn ghosts, the one where you ride blocks around (was a bit challenging too), the ones where you equip a cannon ball gun...basically most of the one-off mechanics were the best. There were some special stages to obtain extra stars, items, or collectible stickers, and the Toad stages stuck out as a lot of fun. You guide Toad through a 3D puzzle level to collect 5 stars. Think Fez. You can rotate the world around to see, and all Toad can do is walk. No running or jumping. So you rotate the camera around trying to figure out the way through the level, collecting all the stars.
That's it. I wouldn't recommend this over Super Mario Galaxy games. Those are way better. Though co-op probably adds to the appeal of World.
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