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Nov 8th, 2023 at 18:09:27 - Homeworld: Remastered Collection (PC) |
Another classic game that I remember playing some as a teenager but never got into. I assumed that a remaster would make it more accessible than a 20-year old space RTS, but it's really...challenging. I'm not sure if this is an issue with the remaster, or it's unsupported, or what is going on, but there were a lot of needlessly complicated things, such as:
- maneuvering the camera in 3d space. I constantly was too high or too low and had trouble viewing what I was trying to view.
- moving units to a specific point. Again, they constantly went too high, too low, or kilometers away. Just like I had trouble looking at what I wanted to see, I had trouble looking at the exact point I wanted units to move to and clicking it.
- friendly AI. This was poor. One thing I noticed is that units kept resetting their stance to "passive," so they'd just sit there getting killed. I kept changing it to aggressive so they'd attack on sight, and they kept changing it back...
- slow. Everything was slow. It took ages for units to move across the map. Production takes a long time. Killing enemies takes a long time.
I was initially enamored with the 3d space and the great atmosphere the game creates. The voiceovers are excellent, the story intriguing. The whole thing has a mood that I liked. But gameplay quickly became a chore. I made it several missions in and quit. I booted up Homeworld 2, and it was exactly like the first one, even with a really similar tutorial and first mission. Decided I'd try the more recent Deserts of Kharak instead. Already enjoying it more, but I do miss being in space!
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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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