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Oct 28th, 2023 at 15:18:19 - Black Mesa (PC) |
Finished this recently and whaaaat a game. This Valve-sanctioned fan remaster of Half-Life is blissful. I never actually beat the original Half-Life. Those were my teenage days when I was mostly obsessed with Diablo II, StarCraft, and Final Fantasy games. I didn't seek out PC games back then, but played what I knew I liked. I remember starting Half-Life several times, riding on the tram and doing some opening chapters, but I never got into it. So THANK YOU Black Mesa team for revitalizing Half-Life! It's tight, looks great, sounds great. It really draws a contrast between shooters before it. I just played DUSK recently too, and that game is reminiscent of pre-Half-Life FPSes. Half-Life is leaps and bounds ahead of what came before it and presumably the boomer shooters that are reviving the pre-Half-Life FPS style.
One of the coolest things about playing Black Mesa is seeing so many pre-cursor ideas to portal: teleportation, the basic physics of picking up and manipulating objects, very environmental puzzles, and so on. Every now and then, I'd be like, "Oh! I bet that's where that idea for xyz thing in Portal came from!" Something as simple as picking up a box would trigger that response. I mean, there weren't many games back then with physics like Half-Life's, and then the physics engine was significantly enhanced and manipulating objects became a core part of the gameplay in Half-Life 2, as with the iconic "Pick up the can" tutorial. Picking up a box fast-forwarded me to picking up a testing cube in Portal. Teleporting in Xen fast-forwarded me to creating portals in Portal.
Speaking of Xen, I had always heard people poo-poo the final area as too long, and I thought that the remake fixed it. Xen starts off super cool, but drags by the time you are fighting the Gonarch, running through tunnel after tunnel unsure of when you'll actually get to kill the thing. I thought Xen was the end of the game! But then, no, there's another chapter called Interloper, and it was SO LONG! Interloper is like...just climbing the biggest most pointlessly tall and complicated tower ever. How would any of the aliens even use this tower? Why are there 500 conveyor belts criss-crossing in every direction, transporting enemies, bouncing upward to the next level of conveyor belts, repeated literally like 20 times, with laser puzzles and other time-wasting shit added in? The final boss was an epic battle, and I won with 2hp left! But seriously, when I finished and started jotting notes about the game, I had to bracket aside my distaste for the last several hours of it. So ignore that. Black Mesa (or the original Half-Life, I suppose) is totally worth playing, necessary even.
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Oct 22nd, 2023 at 21:09:21 - DUSK (PC) |
This is the first "boomer shooter" that I've played on purpose sense becoming aware of the term. What is a boomer shooter? Google around and go down the rabbit hole of people debating it on Reddit...basically, these are Doom/Quake/Wolfenstein homages. Throwbacks to the FPS days before Half-Life. For some reason, this genre is very popular now. I guess young people who didn't grow up with the FPSes of yesteryear really missed out on their simplicity, the straightforward fragging and gibbing, and they want a return to basics.
DUSK has been on my radar for a while. These boomer shooters tend to get really great Steam reviews, and this one is overwhelmingly positive and tops a lot of "best of" lists. So, when I saw it on Amazon Luna, along with Devil May Cry 5, I thought, "Dang, Luna's free games are where it's at!" And I thought I might as well try a boomer shooter. Well, boomer shooters are like being transported back in time. Was DUSK fun? Yes. Was the shooting great? Yes. Were there gibs? Yes. Sarcasm aside, there is nothing wrong with DUSK. I played through the first of three chapters, then got a little bit into the second chapter before turning it off. It didn't feel like anything new. What it was doing, it was doing well, but I guess I want more depth in my FPS games now.
In DUSK, there is a cult. Then there are some military dudes and an experiment gone wrong. I gather the plot goes into outer space. I don't really know what was going on. I don't know who I was. It was thin. I got all the standard FPS guns, killed some bosses, found red, blue, and yellow keys, etc., etc. I think the main thing DUSK has going for it, aside from just being a solid shooter, is the atmosphere. It's got a real horror feel to it, and I legitimately jumped several times at rats. The setting makes the game tense above and beyond the shooting. I know this because I played it on "accessible" for a long time, before turning the difficulty up to something like "I can do it" (which was significantly harder!). So, I wasn't in any danger of dying when those rats were spooking me!
Anyway, there's my review of DUSK and boomer shooters. I'll play another one if it does something really differently. But if they're just really good homages to classic FPS games, then I don't need to stop and look.
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Oct 22nd, 2023 at 20:46:40 - Devil May Cry 5 (PC) |
I just went back and read my entries for DMC (12 years ago...!) and Devil May Cry 4. I was surprised at how familiar the writing sounded. My thoughts on those previous games are similar to my thoughts on Devil May Cry 5. Stylish, over-the-top, an absurd amount of weapons and moves, etc., etc. The main difference is that I was less impressed with this one, maybe because I've seen two of these games before (plus Bayonetta 1 and 2, which are similar). OH, and because I played on Amazon Luna for the first time, which I will talk about at the end.
What makes this game different? There are three main playable characters this time: Nero, Dante, and an emo poetry-lover named V. It takes all of 5 seconds to figure out what "V" stands for, and I waited and waited for the inevitable plot reveal 10 hours later. Dante and Nero play more or less how they did in the previous two games, with a couple additional demon forms for Dante and a bunch of different right-arm weapons for Nero. V was my favorite though. He's physically weak and controls familiars. There is a raven-bird-monster and a panther, plus a giant golem you can summon that stomps around the battlefield shooting lasers. Devil May Cry 5 has the same "stylish" combat system as the others, and I figured out that V was the easiest (for me) to score high. Eventually, I figured out how to make Dante score high too, and by the end of the game, I was getting a lot of SSS rank (Super Sexy Stylin'? So Super Sassy? Snazzy Sword Swatting?), especially in his Gunslinger mode. Basically, it's easier to score high if you use range styles and attacks because when you get hit, your score decreases. Stay at range and you don't get hit. That avoids the problem of me having to learn how to avoid attacks!
The story was convoluted as hell, but told in an interesting way. It all revolves around killing this big baddie demon, king of the Underworld guy. You play segments of time around a pivotal battle, some leading up to the battle, some during, and then the story moves on afterward, and you play from the perspectives of all three characters. Sometimes, you get a choice of who to play. I was often unclear on what the hell was going on, but the story could have been about what the King of the Underworld had for breakfast, and I still would have been entertained. The combat is fantastic. And that's really the point. Not whose brother is whose and whose daddy hates them.
Back to Amazon Luna. That's the reason I played this game now. Every week, I check what games are free on Epic and Amazon through Twitch Prime. I recently noticed that Amazon also had a section for Prime members called "cloud games." You can play a handful of free games each (couple weeks? month?) on Amazon Luna, which is Amazon's cloud gaming service. I think I first noticed this when Citizen Sleeper was on there over the summer, but I was already playing it on Game Pass. Anyway, imagine my surprise to see a AAA game that was on my wishlist appear for free on Luna. I decided to check it out. How does Luna work? You literally just click "play now" and it streams to your computer. Like, that's it. No downloads. It was really fast and smooth...for a while. I think I had two or three play sessions with no problems. Then I was playing on Friday, and the game kept freezing. The first time it did it, I didn't understand what was happening. Normally, when a game freezes, it's the software on your computer. You x out of it or ctl+alt+del, or restart your PC if it comes to that. I did all those things and when I booted Devil May Cry 5 up again on Luna, it was still frozen. Turns out you have to exit the game through Luna to fix it. Okay. Well, the game proceeded to freeze every so often for a few hours, probably 10 times in total that afternoon (I persevered). It was really, really, really irritating. Luckily the game was autosaving regularly, but who knows how much time I spent replaying sections. And god forbid this happen during a game that doesn't autosave often. Then I played DUSK for a while today with no freezes...So like, 95% of the time, when I was playing on Luna this past week, it's been great. The other 5% of the time, when it's freezing, it's frustrating. I'd be pissed if I was paying for it, but for free games, I can put up with it. As for Devil May Cry? I feel like I won't miss skipping the next one in the series.
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Oct 11th, 2023 at 12:50:40 - The Last Guardian (PS4) |
I finished this last night. Sasha watched the last time I played, got a little invested, and disliked the ending! It wasn't terribly satisfying, but I think it was hopeful.
The Last Guardian is by the same minds behind Ico and Shadow of the Colossus, which I didn't know until I finished, and makes total sense. I've been describing it to people since I started playing as a mixture of Ico and Shadow of the Colossus; I'm impressed that I was so on point! You play as a young boy who wakes up in a strange ruin beside a giant chained beast. The boy befriends the beast, names it Trico, and the two of them journey together through these ruins, discover its secrets, solve its puzzles, and overcome its challenges to escape. There is some more story regarding why they are there, how they got there, and what the ruins are, but this is definitely not a game that overwhelms you with lore. You don't get shown much, and you can interpret a lot about what's going on and why. In fact, you don't get TOLD hardly anything. There is sparse subtitled narration, but all other dialogue is spoken in another language, and nearly all in-game communication between characters is non-verbal.
Okay, so a lot of this game is fine, okay, frustrating, and at times borders on maddening. The boy's movement leaves so much to be desired. The "combat" (or, run away from animated suits of armor and mash all the buttons on the controller to squirm away when they catch you) is dreadful. The platforming on architecture is passable, while climbing on Trico is not fun. Some of the puzzles are alright. Trying to get Trico to do what you want can transport you to a personal hell. So you might think, okay, what's the point of playing this merely okay game? Well, here's the thing for me: the game's strengths are SO STRONG that its weaknesses, while significant, are overshadowed.
And the main strength of The Last Guardian? It's the relationship between the boy and the beast, Trico. Playing this game is kind of like hanging out with the best pet you ever had. Trico is like part dog, part cat, part bird. Trico and the boy need one another to progress through the ruins. As their relationship develops, as Trico gains trust in the boy and as the boy feels safe with Trico, they learn to work together. The boy learns how to comfort Trico and give commands (come here, go there...), while Trico discovers some useful abilities.
Trico itself is wonderful. It shakes off water like a dog after swimming; its ears twitch like a cats' when something touches them; Trico scratches itself; whines, whimpers, and howls; its feathers rustle in the breeze; it pounces and bats prey around like some sort of dog-cat. The way this creature is animated is beautiful. I would literally just sit and watch Trico sometimes. If I was stuck on a puzzle, watching Trico was like the calm that helped me think, as if I was petting a cat while thinking about a problem (and my cat was usually in my lap while playing, so I was doing that too). There are other stunning sounds and sights in the game too; the ruins are vast, and the way the game makes the boy look so small and Trico so big (but still so small compared to the vastness of the ruins), is incredible.
But as much as I loved Trico, as I mentioned earlier, it could also be extremely frustrating to deal with (also like your pet!). Trico has a mind of its own. Sometimes it'll do what you command, but other times it willfully ignores you, scratching its ears, looking around, doing whatever it pleases. I would occasionally spend 10 minutes trying to get Trico to do something, like indicating for it to jump to a ledge, or swim through a doorway. Over and over and over pressing the buttons for "Trico, go there!" and Trico looking at me, wandering near what I was pointing at, considering it, laying down, looking at me expectantly. "Trico, go there!" Looking around, scratching itself, yawning. I totally understand that this adds to the realism that this is a great beast with agency, and I totally understand that this made me like Trico more. But on the other hand, there's a fine balance between realism and the fact that this is a game and players want to move forward. Spending 10 minutes trying to get Trico to jump to a ledge is inconsistent with responsive gameplay and could easily kill my motivation during a play session, especially if it happened during some of the more complicated puzzles:
"Trico, my head already hurts. Don't make it worse. That's the only ledge in the room. I know we have to get up there. I can see the door above us. WHY WON'T YOU JUMP TO THE LEDGE?! Oh, what?! NOW you jump when I get off your back? Get back down here, let me climb on you, THEN you jump to the ledge. TRICO! GET DOWN HERE! Tricooooo!"
But then you finally get up to that ledge and through the door, and there is some magical set piece and the game takes your breath away. It's definitely one characterized by highs and lows, but the highs are so high, and the game is so memorable overall. I really enjoyed it overall and recommend it despite its problems.
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