SleepingSilence

Video Games: The General Discussion & Community Thread Number Two

From all the issues and disappointments I've had with games lately. I was worried about all the "framerate stuttering" problems that this game was supposed to have...(According to Steam.)

But Cult Of The Lamb runs perfectly fine and is an enjoyable enough time sink. (One in which I had to restart from scratch, because I failed to understand and properly build several crucial things that I needed to progress.)

And now I'm also playing Borderlands 3, since it was on sale, and I can crossplay it with a friend. (Hopefully it'll be better than the Prequel game was, at least.)

What shows/movies are you watching?

The Lazarus Project: Time Loop stories should be the easiest thing in the world to make appealing right from the start. But this one feels delusional (and already dated beyond belief), poorly acted, and the characters act like they're in a horror movie. "Ala speak vaguely, be an asshole, and never listen to what someone else has to say - and voilà - you create instant conflict!" (So it didn’t even manage to hold my interest for the entire episode.)

Mythica: A Quest For Heroes: (Think "Gamers", but without a sense of humor and Rey is your main protagonist.) It's ambitious to make five whole movies, out of a minimal budget, I guess? But I wouldn’t call this film entertaining. Nor would I recommend it as a "hidden gem". Since its cliché-riddled plot is impossibly bare-bones, and yet it still struggles to make any sense. So you’ll be struggling to find things to even enjoy about it, like "oh look, it gets 'cold breath' right. And I just watched a modern big budget movie that failed to have that." (So, I'll give it an E for effort, and move on.)

Redline: I swear I saw this before. But I definitely didn't watch the dub version. So it was thoroughly entertaining, for what it is. (Certainly a feast for the eyes.) Though the pacing is breakneck like nearly all anime movies, and the plot clearly did not matter to the writer at all.

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I actually enjoyed Nope.

@BangoSkank

Who do you think was the reason I watched it in the first place? >:c

I’d have accepted its slow start, if anything that was shown previously had mattered in the long run.

The only positive thing that kept me going was how Keke Palmer's character was playing an "enjoyably annoying” character. (Since she seemed to be the ONLY one giving a performance of some kind. Then I looked up her IMDB to see what else she’s done, and saw she was a character in Big Mouth.) But after she went on to lecture an entire audience at her brother's workplace, and then they all proceeded to smile and clap in response. I realized that the movie DID NOT have any sense of self awareness. (I seriously think the movie struggled to find a tone and stick with it.)

What shows/movies are you watching?

>Have more things that I intend to watch and add onto this post later. But these movies made me stop preemptively.

''Reviews'' for...
Sunshine: I imagine the high praise for this movie comes from the critics that obsess over cinematography. (Since this movie is style over substance in every way.) The plot and pacing of this movie is a clusterfuck. And I think this movie tried to make the characters seem human by making them all disastrous fuck ups. But for a mission to save the planet, you’d think they’d pick less stupid, reckless, irrational and more empathetic individuals? (Apparently both the writer and director are pretentious as hell though. And that comes across in the movie they made.) So, yeah sure, the last third might’ve been the worst part of it. (And it only gets worse and worse as it goes on.) But the nonsense writing is apparent from the start.

Nope: It has a literal “and then everyone clapped” scene within the first ten minutes. As if I needed such a transparent sign of how the writing will be for the rest of the film. And “What was the point…fuck the point” is a line in the movie that describes how I feel about it. (And an apology to Sunshine, your writing was not this bad.) The first hour plus of this movie was an endurance test of how long you can stand nothing of interest/substance happening. With countless ‘meta’ scenes and references about shows and making them. I Nope’d out of this movie and hit fast forward. (Two hours to see one cool shot/idea that I have to assume the whole movie was created for.)

Pandorum: The first monsters shown in this are basically the Navi, and the planet of the Navi is called Pandora. But then it's just the creatures from The Descent. This feels like a pilot of a show on SyFy. It has an abundance of sci-fi concepts, some better than others. The acting is far superior to the past two movies I watched. (And there’s no fucking cringy modern dialogue.) But the pacing is off, the audio mixing can get obnoxious, and the editing is a mess. And “the story” is in desperate need of an editor.

Video Games: The General Discussion & Community Thread Number Two

>An hour and thirty minutes of messing around with controls and trying to grasp simple movements later...

Okay...

So I have stopped playing games that I've wanted to like more, because of how the basic controls felt. (Shovel Knight felt clunky to move as, Celeste made diagonal jumping seem harder than it should've been to pull off, and Rain World felt like it was first made on Newgrounds and had some kind of archaic control scheme as a result. Yet the devs raised the game's base price recently, w/o adding anything. But one problem at a time.)

But now I've discovered an entirely different beast that makes me want to rant and rave. So I'll do it here...

Outer Wilds has THE WORST

I repeat.

THE FUCKING WORST flight controls that I've ever experienced in a video game on Steam. It's like I'm playing a shitty Kinect game. AND NOT ONCE, is that mentioned in its general reviews.

And again, this would've been refunded already, if had I bought this game myself. (Making it a strong contender for 'the most disappointing game that I played this year'. Along with Ghost Song and the rest of the games that haven't lived up to their critical reception.)

Video Games: The General Discussion & Community Thread Number Two

@Dark Cloud I honestly don't care for its "Adult Swim cartoon/deliberately ugly" art style. But I'm sure it has its appeal/charm, and it seems like it's doing fine on Steam. (Going by all the fanart that it has on Twitter.)

Video Games: The General Discussion & Community Thread Number Two

My wishlist has substantially grown, and I’ll likely never get to all the games I want to play.

I'd give Hyper Light Drifter a strong 7. (It really feels like where Death's Door got some of its inspiration. Because they feel very similar to me. Except this one doesn't overstay its welcome. Since there is no secret hidden ending. So you don't have to feel obligated to get 100% completion.)

Has a pretty decent atmosphere and soundtrack. Combat is challenging, and I beat most of the bosses on my first try. (Though the former is mostly due to filling the screen with enemies, and the latter felt like brute force luck on my part.) And while it certainly doesn't hold your hand as to where you're supposed to be going. The rewards for exploration were often hidden behind progress walls that I hadn't completed yet. So without any map markers to make the purposefully obscure map any more useful; it made backtracking and finding secrets less than ideal.

Biggest nags were how the dash and platforming needs tweaking, because it's occasionally inconsistent otherwise. (Leading to unfair damage being dealt.) And how certain upgrades are pointless and others are 100% needed to progress. But I was able to finish the game, and feel a little underwhelmed from the narrative. However, the gameplay was solid enough.

On the opposite side of the spectrum, Lonesome Village is about as fucking awful as you can make a game. But I tried my damnedest to get through it anyway. (Until my character got stuck in the ground, and that cost me hours of progress. Because the game has no autosave.) As if this game wasn’t already getting tedious, with its Navi-like tutorial character popping up every other second. And I’d honestly ask for a refund, if it wasn’t an x-mas present.

Thirdly, I decided to play Bloody Hell (a free bullet hell on Steam) and it’s pretty damn good. (Haha pun.) Even if I still suck at twin-stick shooting. And I don’t know why I originally thought your character looked like an old homeless man with a beard.

Video Games: The General Discussion & Community Thread Number Two

So I went through two narrative focused games (that I got for x-mas), and feel disappointed in both of them.

Starting with, "Beacon Pines", a game not shy about who its pandering too. The character dialogue is probably the best part here, and was genuinely amusing at times. But the game's story threads feel completely unfinished, and the branching 'choices matter' narrative shtick did not do this game any favors. All in all, the story didn't make a whole lot of sense, and it felt like an unfinished project. (5/10? Maybe. I wish it ended a bit stronger.)

Next, "Unavowed". (Another game in the Blackwell Series, that I liked for the most part.) This one had a lot of optional voiced character dialogue (that I'm sure someone will find interesting), and the puzzles for most of its gameplay are fair ones. Something rare for its genre. But then it decided to have the worst level(s) and story ending to completely ruin whatever else the game had going for it. (Confusing level design, tedious backtracking, pointless walling off progress, mocks/condemns player, moon logic puzzles, awful child voice acting.) It had every bad thing you could imagine in a narrative point & click. (5/10 But I straight up dislike this one's "we're so smart/modern hollywood-esque" narrative.) And it was bad enough to make me want to switch genres.

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I don't have Gamepass. (For the fair trade of not spending money on an Xbox.) Thus, my Steam wishlist grows...

Video Games: The General Discussion & Community Thread Number Two

Nobody Saves The World has a lot of content, and its numerous forms are fun to use. But the lacking challenge and enemy variety makes me feel like this game is a more passive experience. (Where I have to bring my own soundtrack, or listen to something else while I'm playing.) Though not everything in the game is a cakewalk. It has several side missions seemingly designed to be purposefully impossible, until you get some kind of overpowered combination through excess grinding. (But being annoying as hell, is not the same as creating an engaging objective.) So I might push my way through the final few levels. (With my own soundtrack, of course.) But while it gives you a nice variety of things to grind. (Literally gives you a "move around" experience bar near the end game.) I can't claim it "gets grind right", when I'm starting to grow a little sick of "breaking enemy wards" for 30 different characters. (Probably getting a 6/10 from me.)

And the story isn't charming me that much either, but maybe it'll end better?

Also, I recently watched a let's play stream of Hi-Fi Rush, and goddamn the game is filled to the brim with charm. (Far better than the initial "this game looks like RWBY" impressions that I originally got from it. Ha ha stupid male MC aside.) Plus the soundtrack seems better and more focused than No Straight Roads' was. (And I guess I'm not the only person to think so, since its director got upset at the unfavorable comparisons.) Though I'm not sure how much I'd personally connect to its gameplay. Since I haven't played many rhythm games.

Video Games: The General Discussion & Community Thread Number Two

Nobody Saves The World is grind-tastic so far. Time will tell how fun the game will stay.

What's everyone else playing?

Anime & Manga! Oh my! (Anime/Manga Thread)

Isn't that every anime season, though?

@Kuro

I don't think it's been quite to this level of "we don't care" in a while. (Most rushed anime were simply delayed into oblivion. Even during Covid.) Now perfectly good (or serviceable) concepts are being completely ruined through it's terrible/non-animation. The last modern seasonal anime I can remember watching several episodes in a row that were filled with dozens of still images and concept art for simple dialogue scenes—was never. Because I've never seen something so lazy before...

But I guess I'm watching more anime/longer than I expected to. Though I don't know how many I'll see through to the end.