general gaming

[teal cliff]

they see themselves as a top tier global company that should be selling the most games

They're upset that TOTK probably sold more than FF16

[random steppe]

To be fair I did expect it to sell a bit more as well

And it probably would have if it didn't drop in one of the busiest period for great games to come out

That said I don't think Square expectations would have been just a "bit" more

No wait, reading headlines they are dumb

It sold a bit less than FF7 Remake on launch, why would they expect it'd sell a lot more?

FF7 remake had the nostalgia boost too

Do they think they are pre FFXIII? they destroyed their own franchise with 3 titles one worse than the last, if they want big numbers they have to build their fanbase back up.

[teal cliff]

?

FF15 was like the best game they'd released since 12

[random steppe]

No I mean the 3 FFXIII games

Agreed FFXV was okay, that said that finale was pretty bad, they should release games that actually finish and not cliffhanger in my opinion

[teal cliff]

I mean yeah, but FFXV's development was apparently the worst thing ever, so.

[slim thorn]

I think you're agreeing again

[random steppe]

Also they did build a decent core fanbase with FFXIV, a MMO which is mainly on PC, then they release their next game as a PS5 exclusive...

Hope the bag was worth it, but then they can't complain when they sell their game not on their main platform

Yeah I'm not disagreeing with Justice, I'm just constantly flabbergasted by Square incompetence

[slim thorn]

it is very weird

but all of this is ultimately summing up why non-"fans" like me got drawn into a game like TotK and not into FF16, both franchises I've historically played and liked some of but overall have mixed feelings about

[teal cliff]

I'm a final fantasy fan, I just didn't buy 16 because it doesn't look good

[quiet swift]

[mossy flume]

I’m rather enjoying FFXVI.

Wildly better than FFXV was

[wind stump]

i saw a clip where you used Ifrit as a mount

[mossy flume]

||I fucking love the kaiju fights, they’re incredibly epic||

[wind stump]

that's all i need to know to want to play the game one day

[mossy flume]

YoshiP knows what he’s doing

[wind stump]

yeah i could tell YoshiP had involvement from the designs

almost like they took the concept from a critically acclaimed MMORPG...

[mossy flume]

Much of the FFXIV team is involved.

[wind stump]

Which just makes me want an Ifrit mount in FFXIV now

[mossy flume]

Heh

[wind stump]

oh my god what if they do a crossover with FFXVI like they did for FFXV

[mossy flume]

Didn’t they announce one? I might’ve hallucinated that

But that would be awesome

Give me a Torgal mount/pet

Torgal is love 🐺

[wind stump]

got to ride the car exactly O N C E

[mossy flume]

Did you not get your own?

[wind stump]

I DON'T KNOW HOW
Also I started way too late to get it prolly

[mossy flume]

Oof

[quiet swift]

Isn't that the casino?

[mossy flume]

Yeah it was a limited time thing

It might be available through the Gold Saucer? I dunno

[thorny loom]

Tara strong game is getting a remake

https://www.pcgamer.com/the-lollipop-chainsaw-remake-finally-has-a-name-just-in-time-to-get-delayed-a-year/

[mossy flume]

But there was a limited time quest that gave it to you

[quiet swift]

Meanwhile, me

[teal cliff]

its come back before

itll probably come back again

[mossy flume]

Yeah I have it too

[teal cliff]

I also had the car.

[mossy flume]

It’s so ridiculously out of place thematically

[quiet swift]

Nah, just stolen from a noble of the Empire?

[mossy flume]

Heh

[wind stump]

I BEAT NIER AUTOMATA LETS GO

[mossy flume]

Ah but did you get the true ending? Or the true true ending?

[wind stump]

no i yeeted a chip out of 2B and instakilled her

[quiet swift]

Or the True true true ending?

[wind stump]

IN THE TUTORIAL

[quiet swift]

[mossy flume]

Heh yep you can do that

[little badger]

[wind stump]

I was fucking around in the menus and I was like "Oh cool I can remove HUD UI if I want- wait, removal means death?

He wouldn't, would he?

does it anyway

MOTHERFUCKER LMAO"

[little badger]

What game HC?

[river veldt]

it looks like da Batmobile

[thorny loom]

Neir automata

[teal cliff]

Is this saints row?

[little badger]

[little badger]

Ah right.

[little badger]

What difficulty did you play it on

[wind stump]

Am, Normal

I got one of the joke endings in the tutorial

So I technically beat the game! Got an ending!

[little badger]

Nice.

[wind stump]

god i'm so good at this game, already beaten it twice

[dire gate]

Are you doing all the stupid endings or are you just doing it casually

[wind stump]

After my friend told me there's an ending for failing the tutorial I had to do it

and Ending T was just me fucking around and finding out

You give me an option to kill myself in a stupid way and I'll fuckin do it

uuh

don't take that out of context

[dire gate]

Rule of Thumb

"Do whatever they don't want you to do, do whatever they tell you not to do"

[wind stump]

trusting Yoko Taro, lmao

look i finished all 5 endings of Replicant, I'm already traumatised

half of my playtime so far is going
"HEY I KNOW THIS FROM REPLICANT/FFXIV RAIDS"

and then promptly having PTSD kick in, lmao

[feral tulip]

https://fxtwitter.com/NickBrawlGame/status/1690015227931197440?t=dDk_RpT8Fke7qeB98KV-1w&s=19

[random steppe]

I think it looks good but I'm not buying a playstation for it.
They should release their games on the platforms where people want to buy them, so they don't have to complain about people not buying them

[wind stump]

BEST GAME EVER

[fickle garnet]

FFXVI is amazing

[slim thorn]

I'm so far out of their loop it hadn't even occurred to me that I don't want to play anything on a console any more

[thorny loom]

https://vxtwitter.com/theyisusone/status/1690000216634609664?s=46&t=bVzXPIZvXYyJJoEkCfgMsQ

[bleak lintel]

Final Fantasy games are always decisive because they're mechanically different from each other.

[dense crypt]

You mean divisive?

[bleak lintel]

Yeah ipad autocorrected it for some reason.

[dense crypt]

I agree with this in the case of ff13 since it was so dramatically different but 1-9 were all very similar

2 and 5 were different in the way they handled leveling though

2s system just kinda sucked though

[gaunt marten]

I looooove FF2's leveling system

[bleak lintel]

And the first game was heavily influenced by DnD.

[gaunt marten]

It's my favorite because it's so easy to exploit

[wind stump]

did i mention best game ever?
GUNDAAAAAAAAAM

[teal cliff]

The protagonist seems like a very generic white guy hero character

[white phoenix]

I had no interest in ff16 either until I saw the demo, which was mindblowing

[teal cliff]

Can you even play as any of the companions or is it just that guy?

[dense crypt]

Just thst guy

Couldnt play as anyone else in FF15 tbh

[white phoenix]

you could play as the kid for a little in the demo

[teal cliff]

All 4 of the main characters are playable

and Ardyn has his own DLC

[dense crypt]

Not what i mean

[teal cliff]

Well you can swap to your party members at any time during combat, what else did you mean?

[dense crypt]

In FF15 you spend a majority of timr as noctis rsther than jump around between characters like in the ff7 remake

[teal cliff]

I spent most of my time in combat as Prompto

[dense crypt]

I dont remember ever being able to change characters at any time in ff15

[teal cliff]

It's an unlockable skill in the skill tree for each companion that allows you to switch to them at any time during combat. They each have their own unique gameplay mechanics.

[dense crypt]

I see

[teal cliff]

Out of combat stuff will still be done as Noctis but that didn't really bother me since there's no unique mechanics involved in walking around

[dense crypt]

Thats why, i never went for that

[teal cliff]

I beelined straight for it. It's very fun to play as the other guys.

[dense crypt]

Well ive not heard about the ability to do thst in ff16

[teal cliff]

I'm not really surprised. The marketing of the game was very focused on main guy.

[fickle garnet]

Yeah you can only play as Clive in FFXVI but the combat is very fun

[white phoenix]

yeah they got some dmc guys to work on the combat

the development of ff16 was almost like a crossover of all the japanese devs

[fresh bane]

Not ''some dmc guys''

the DMC guy

Ryota Suzuki, specifically

[wind stump]

I am shocked at how accurate this is recreated

[fickle garnet]

Once i heard he was working on it i knew the combat would be good

[wind stump]

shocked i say

[astral steeple]

https://twitter.com/DiscussingFilm/status/1690078746106097664

DiscussingFilm (@DiscussingFilm)

A new South Park game ‘SOUTH PARK: SNOW DAY’ is releasing in 2024.

Likes

117

Twitter · Aug 11, 2023, 7:12 PM

ITS 3D WHAT

[quiet swift]

[wind stump]

Quake 3?

I now fully understand why this game is so well liked

[green fulcrum]

There are...other reasons.

[white phoenix]

bap no

[quiet swift]

[wind stump]

they didn't have to make the Stubbys non-hostile

[thorny loom]

Man people are not letting up on ow2 now they can review it

[wind stump]

but i like them
they're cute

[quiet swift]

Bandwagoning of hate~

[thorny loom]

Tbh. After them canceling the advertised pve mode. I find it hard not to be mad

Also new south park game

https://youtu.be/XijeJLAYLBE

[quiet swift]

LIke what was said earlier. People are not wrong to be disappointed. But the numbers/magnitude is an extreme that is less "i'm dissapointed" and more "dogpiling to shit on the game becasuse i'm disappointed and oh everyone else is doing it too lol"

The gameplay itself is fun from everything I've heard. The monetization is pretty bad, but not the worst in the industry by a long shot. Is this a 1/10 game? Not in the slightest

[slim thorn]

like so many internet freakouts, the reaction is more about the gap between promises and reality than how the product compares to other real products

[quiet swift]

[slim thorn]

the only real solution is to categorically refuse to buy into hype culture for anything that's not finished yet

[quiet swift]

Good luck getting gamers to do that~

[arctic fern]

The problem is that overwatch 2 is literally overwatch 1

The differences are minor at best

They promised a bunch of features that not only weren't delivered, were never actually planned to be delivered

[quiet swift]

That's not accurate

[slim thorn]

the "never planned" part?

[quiet swift]

Yeah

[thorny loom]

Blizzard was close to redemption with diablo 4

But then they over nerfed everyones stuff

[quiet swift]

D4 has other problems than that - it's still at the moment a minimum viable product, so to speak. An extremely well polished one, mind you, but at the moment it feels somewhat bare bones

Though comparing it to D3 which is what, 10+ years old now, and POE that had a lot of time to be worked on, it's hard to compare

[mossy flume]

They did promise to deliver things. They just changed their minds afterwards.

[quiet swift]

To quote what I said earlier:

[mossy flume]

The entire point of OW2 was defeated by that change though

[quiet swift]

"The Overwatch team, especially at its inception, considered itself an MMO development team. As we transitioned away from that original concept and started creating Overwatch, we included plans to one day return to that scope. We had a crawl, walk, run plan. Overwatch was the crawl, a dedicated version of PvE was the walk, and an MMO was the run. It was built into the DNA of the team early on, and some of us considered that final game a true realization of the original vision of Project Titan."

The scrapped titan just slimmed down to the OW part, and they wanted OW 2 (with the pve stuff that was initially announced) to be the Walk stage, basically attempting the plan again. But I believe they just couldn't justify the cost and just couldn't get it where they wanted in the time they had```

[rose rose]

But it was also a free in-place changeover, no? Feels hard to be too upset that a thing you didn't pay for didn't achieve what it set out to do.

[astral steeple]

id probably get into OW2 if the monetization wasnt so bad tbh lol

[quiet swift]

Says the person who buys everything in Fortnite?

[mossy flume]

Yeah I’m pretty sure they gave everyone OW2 for free if you already owned OW1

[slim thorn]

the expectations gap here reminds me of Mass Effect 3 and No Man's Sky (in that they promised something massive and revolutionary but delivered something utterly ordinary), though I believe those generated much more outrage at the time

[mossy flume]

I have OW2 and I didn’t pay for it

At least I think I do

[astral steeple]

well yeah i buy mostly everything in fort but with OW2 its much worse with its MTX's

[mossy flume]

So in practice it was just an update

[slim thorn]

oh yeah, that would explain the reaction being merely some review bombing

[quiet swift]

[mossy flume]

Didn’t they put a paywall in front of some characters who were previously accessible?

[quiet swift]

If you're new to the game, yes

COnverting from OW1 to 2 you'd get them free

[mossy flume]

Ah

[quiet swift]

I mean, it's both. It definitely deserves a mediocre score but not 10%. That's pure review bombing there for the sake of bombing

[rose rose]

Sounds like gamers being gamers

[arctic fern]

Not really

[slim thorn]

I think we're all agreeing again

[arctic fern]

There's also the simple fact the company itself is terrible
People stealing breastmilk for some fucking reason

[astral steeple]

tf??????

[gaunt marten]

Oh yeah

[quiet swift]

See, that's the problem with the review system in general being yes or no

[gaunt marten]

That's low on the list of bad things Blizzard did

And also not related to the game

[quiet swift]

Rating the game on its own, the gameplay aspect, it would have a decent score. Then you could score the monetization (bad), the company itself (bad), etc etc

[slim thorn]

it is hard to beat the intuitiveness of thumbs up or down, but I would prefer a 5 or at least 3 point scale for this

[quiet swift]

Review bombing is just by far the easiest way to do things

[gaunt marten]

Monetization and gameplay are inextricable parts of the overall experience of the game

Both are relevant to the game. The company is not

[quiet swift]

True, but we all know that it would just end up being 1 star or 4-5 and nothing in between

[slim thorn]

right, one of the reasons I avoid number scores for anything is that you often can't separate a game into components with individual rankings without grossly misrepresenting something

[quiet swift]

I'd almost rather see surveys, like "strongly agree/strongly disagree" for various points (graphics, gameplay, monetization, blah)

[mossy flume]

This very problem is why the downvotes on YouTube were hidden from the general public, incidentally.

[slim thorn]

admittedly I never post Steam reviews myself

[mossy flume]

Being able to see the immediate effects of review bombing is part of what incentivizes review bombing campaigns

Me neither

And ultimately I find that reviews aren’t super useful to me anyway

[arctic fern]

The trouble is that review bombing is one of the only ways to talk to companies in a way that matters

[slim thorn]

I wouldn't agree that it "matters"

but I agree that it's a desperation move due to a broken system with no better options

[gaunt marten]

I reviewed 0.6% of my games

[quiet swift]

How can you tell?

[slim thorn]

since we all know "just don't buy it" never works

[gaunt marten]

Your profile has a review page

https://i.imgur.com/OzVnWxx.png

I have two negative and seven positive reviews

[quiet swift]

1.3% here!

[arctic fern]

It matters because it's incredibly obvious that something is wrong
We're talking about it, people are dissuaded from buying the game because of it
It's having an effect

It's hard to ignore

[slim thorn]

eh? it just dissuades me from ever looking at user reviews

we know many review bombing campaigns have nothing to do with the game's quality

[arctic fern]

Sure

But there are often more factors in play than game quality

[mossy flume]

In cases when it’s a game quality issue, it can and often does get patched. But the review bomb history remains, which skews the review score.

[dense crypt]

rate my not!vault hunter

[arctic fern]

Reviewing a game poorly because the game maker is a scumbag is, in my opinion, fine considering the limited ways to warn potential customers of such a fact

[dense crypt]

image isnt great but it is what it is

[quiet swift]

It took until what, a month or two ago for Cyberpunk to be reviewed as mostly positive?

[arctic fern]

If there was better methods, then it wouldn't be, but there isnt

[quiet swift]

Ah, very

[green fulcrum]

[mossy flume]

I wonder if Valve ever considered the idea of reviews for developer and publisher profiles on Steam. Those profiles exist, after all.

[arctic fern]

That can only go poorly lol

[mossy flume]

On the other hand, would that even be useful?

Yeah it’s not like people feel incentivized to post positive reviews

[gaunt marten]

Steam provides good tools for a user to judge whether reviews are valid or not for their purpose

https://i.imgur.com/cVEeTEL.png

[mossy flume]

Only negative

[arctic fern]

I agree it would help but only as a method for more abuse

[mossy flume]

Yeah, not a good idea

[gaunt marten]

You can include or exclude a date range, periods can be marked as off-topic, and you can exclude reviews from people who haven't played the game long enough to judge it

[mossy flume]

If that was exposed by default then that might be handy

How many people know of that?

I didn’t

[minor plover]

it's been fun watching my wife play Dark Souls as a Robin Hood character. She's ever only attuned one spell (flash sweat, to get through some lava) and is all bow and balder side sword and willing to do things like kill Patches the first time he shows up.

[gaunt marten]

It is exposed by default but you have to scroll down to read the reviews

[rose rose]

Doesn't Steam actually consider review bombing to be generally off-topic? In which case I might expect these to be cleaned up at some point.

Or was that someone else? I only vaguely recall.

[gaunt marten]

Yeah, it does!

[quiet swift]

I'm pretty sure they've cleaned some up in the past

[mossy flume]

They do attempt to moderate review bomb campaigns sometimes

Not always

Only when it becomes majorly publicized, really

[quiet swift]

I think for some very high profile stuff. I suspect this might be a target at some point

[gaunt marten]

Off-topic periods get erased from the scores up top, but the scores at the bottom allow you to choose to include them back

[slim thorn]

I'm not sure what "the" solution is to all this, but I'm pretty sure part of it is that we need user submitted opinions(?) to get aggregated into something just a little more nuanced than a single yes/no or 1-10 score

[rose rose]

Sounds like it's time to break out the large language models

(/s)

[slim thorn]

but I understand why the general trend so far has been to go in the exact opposite direction; too few incentives for people to input their normal, non-extreme opinions in any comprehensive fashion

[gaunt marten]

I like what Steam does and think part of the solution is to allow people access to as much information as they need in order to judge for themselves

[fresh bane]

I don't think there's anything wrong or any problem to be solved here, just like there wasn't anything inherently wrong with YT dislikes at all
If people review bomb or massively dislike it's a problem of people doing it not the system itself

[slim thorn]

right, as a single consumer within the current system, you have to read textual reviews from humans you know, even if only a few sentences long; there's just no other sensible move

[arctic fern]

Review bombs are important information tho
If a large group of people have to say something about a game, it's important to know that if you plan to buy it

[fresh bane]

It is, but it's important to also know why, and luckily in Steam you can just scroll down to the reviews and check to see whether people review bombing are having legitimate concerns that may concern you as a customer or are just being petty assholes

[slim thorn]

the reason behind the review bomb might be, but as often as not it just means the game made [rule 2 stuff] angry, or had wildly inaccurate marketing

[arctic fern]

Maybe why they are complaining has nothing to do with you but I feel people need a voice

[arctic fern]

Both are valid things to complain about!

[slim thorn]

well, sure, but not there

[fresh bane]

I do think it's important that there is a visible change in people's reception of a game if the game screws up, changed way too much in a way customers didn't like, didn't deliver, or whatever other legitimate reason

[slim thorn]

whether a game's marketing was accurate has nothing to do with whether I'll enjoy buying the thing now

[arctic fern]

If not there then where else?

[slim thorn]

I think we're just going in circles now

I don't think making review scores even more meaningless is a productive expression of consumer grievances

[arctic fern]

I think that's super important info, even years down the line! If z game was promised with 100 features but only give 10, at launch I would want to know that and a year later I'd still want to know that

[slim thorn]

I mean it's fun historical trivia sometimes, but as far as my purchase decision I'd rather know what's actually in the game

[fresh bane]

I think it's pretty harmless from the perspective of a brand new customer
Skullgirls' situation comes to mind, where the game recently underwent pretty big censorship changes to content people had already paid for, a lot of stuff removed or completely changed, and... well, of course people who payed money for it are upset about it, because the content they paid for either isn't there anymore or is completely changed now

but a new customer or new player may not care about that maybe

[arctic fern]

I'd want to know if it improved, yes

[fresh bane]

The worst that having this option could do is just make a new customer read some reviews, notice that people are complaining about stuff that may not affect their experience, and just say ''oh well this won't affect me'' and just buy the game if it was interesting enough for them

and to be fair nowadays it's so easy to check whenever a game has a big controversy like this whether or not the game has improved or whether or not that controversy or reason for review bombing it's something you care about or whatever may be happening

[gaunt marten]

Well the worst thing is it would stop people from reading reviews altogether because they now think it's a waste of time

[fresh bane]

Sucks for those people I guess

[gaunt marten]

It sucks for the platform and the publishers too

An economical environment where there's less trust is one where money is exchanged less

That's why Valve is incentivized to give people the idea that reviews are good and helpful

[mossy flume]

I learned a long time ago that reviews often don’t align with my own opinions of games anyway, so ultimately they exceptionally rarely provide any useful insight to me. I just ignore them unless a game’s rating is overwhelmingly negative.

[fresh bane]

Of course it sucks for the platform but what can you really do if people go around life with that black and white logic rather than thinking ''oh people in this specific game in this specific moment right now are review bombing''

[mossy flume]

And honestly this basically works for online reviews of just about anything

Reviews will, at absolute best, weigh in as 10% of my decision to buy something

[fresh bane]

You already have all the reviews people write so you can check whether they're bs or not, a timeline of the review score to check if it's suffering a massive review bombing right now, the only other ''solution'' to making sure these people don't think reviews are a waste of time is to carefully select what reviews are shown and at that point I think I don't even have to mention why that's a bad idea

[gaunt marten]

Yeah, ideally reviews would align with your opinion of games, but now you're basically forced to find a subset of reviewers whom you align with.

[river veldt]

loll Toad saying "i don't even know how i got down here" at the bottom of the big long water pipe in Lake Kingdom is so funny

[fresh bane]

Like I said this is a problem of people reviewing or reading reviews not of a system inherently

[mossy flume]

Alas, I’ve not found any that do.

So it’s a waste of time for me and I just form my own opinion

[gaunt marten]

No professional critics or friends?

[mossy flume]

Not really, no.

[arctic fern]

that... that was always the case?

[slim thorn]

pretty much

[arctic fern]

any review aggregation system is inherently flawed

[slim thorn]

part of the reason numerical scores are silly is that most people don't want the same stuff out of their entertainment

[gaunt marten]

It was always the case but it doesn't necessarily have to be.

For me, reviews tend to be a very good indicator of quality.

[river veldt]

i still sometimes watch Zero Punctuation even though i disagree with a lot of his video game opinions

[mossy flume]

I’m pretty much always the first person in my friend group to try something. My friends whose media preferences align with mine just check with me rather than the other way around.

[slim thorn]

I often find value in reviewers I disagree with, because once you're familiar with them knowing why they liked or disliked a thing still allows you to infer certain things about how you'd react to a game

[arctic fern]

you have people who dont like that genre and never would being mixed with people who are super into the genre
if you dont like, say, city builders those reviews are unhelpful and if you love city builders yo have the same problem

[mossy flume]

His opinions are amusing more than anything. I often disagree with his actual assessments but I like watching him sometimes.

[slim thorn]

but ZP specifically I just stopped finding funny after a while, and found he'd zero in too much on the parts of a game that are easy to make fun of

...I didn't even use "zero" on purpose there lol

[arctic fern]

same problem why rotten tomatoes is an unhelpful review site

[mossy flume]

Heh

[river veldt]

other than ZP i don't really watch many game reviews

[flint iron]

I am my favorite game reviewer

[river veldt]

based

[gaunt marten]

Your reviews are not helpful to you at all because they introduce no information new to you

[slim thorn]

I used to seek out reviewers to see if I found them useful but for the last several years I keep hearing about games through ordinary word of mouth faster than I could ever play them, so an actual source of reviews has become superfluous for me personally

[gaunt marten]

Unless you happen to have retrograde amnesia

[river veldt]

my reviews are helpful to me because i know best what kind of video games i want to play

[gaunt marten]

You don't need to review things to know what kind of games you want to play

You already know

[mossy flume]

Also it’s just that I have unusual tastes. Like I absolutely adore certain games that universally did not review well.

[river veldt]

yes i came out of the womb knowing i didn't like rpgs /j

[mossy flume]

Or plenty of games that are universally acclaimed I simply dislike, like Skyrim

[river veldt]

Skyrim is universally acclaimed ?

[slim thorn]

well

[mossy flume]

Yeah

[arctic fern]

of course it is?

and i actually hate it

[mossy flume]

It got several re-releases for a reason

Like five or six of them

[slim thorn]

Ixrec — Yesterday at 8:30 PM
the discourse around Skyrim almost immediately convinced me I would hate it lol

[river veldt]

i love Skyrim

[mossy flume]

Considered one of the greatest games ever

[arctic fern]

theres a reason "skyrim on a smart fridge" is a joke

[mossy flume]

Also I just do not like it

I consider it mediocre

[slim thorn]

(I've never heard that one)

[arctic fern]

thats why i hate it

[astral steeple]

ngl ive always preferred morrowind more than skyrim

[river veldt]

i don't know how something can be "universally acclaimed" if everyone just complains about it

[thorny loom]

https://www.gamesradar.com/after-17-years-one-of-diablos-most-beloved-successors-is-getting-a-sequel/

[arctic fern]

personally found morrowind clunky and confusing and preferred oblivion but id would LOVE a modern morrowind remake with better UI and such

[mossy flume]

People complain about Minecraft constantly but it’s one of the two most popular video games in world history

[river veldt]

Morrowind has a nice setting

[mossy flume]

People can complain about things that they love

[river veldt]

i don't understand this at all lol

[astral steeple]

also unrelated but

https://www.dexerto.com/roblox/roblox-gets-hamilton-crossover-no-one-asked-for-2246321/

[arctic fern]

things we love we see the flaws in more

[slim thorn]

I once watched some very long video essays on all of the Elder Scrollses, which I'm glad I did since now I know for certain I would not enjoy any of them, but at least I understand why Morrowind and Skyrim in particular are favorites for so many

[river veldt]

i don't

[mossy flume]

It’s entirely possible and typical to see the possibilities in things you love

And be frustrated when those possibilities can’t be met

[river veldt]

yeah i don't get it sorry

[arctic fern]

thats not a positive trait i think
everything has flaws

[mossy flume]

Like I absolutely love Apple’s products in nearly every dimension but I’ll happily bash on them for their bullshit decisions

Because they could make better decisions which makes their products even better

Like supporting Vulkan

Grumble grumble

[slim thorn]

to be clear, I'm not "complaining" about Skyrim in the sense that I have any ill will towards it or any emotional damage suffered from it

[mossy flume]

Yeah it’s unhealthy to have blind faith in anything

[slim thorn]

it's very firmly in the "not my thing /shrug" category, like most strategy genres, most multiplayer stuff, etc; since I know upfront I won't like it I just don't engage with it and other people enjoy it and we all win

[mossy flume]

In my case I just don’t like the game feel or the setting

[gaunt marten]

Most fun games

[river veldt]

now everyone's just misinterpreting what i meant. im not saying that everything is perfect, i'm saying i don't see the reason in focusing on the cons over the pros

[gaunt marten]

I just don't like fun games. I want my games to be tedious and tiring

[arctic fern]

thats literally not what anyone said

the complete opposite in fact

[river veldt]

[slim thorn]

sometimes people talk as if they unironically want tedious and tiring games and I'm never sure how seriously to take that

[thorny loom]

We should play monopoly then

[mossy flume]

Oh I see. The thing is that people can complain about the cons at length because the pros may not need to be discussed further or are already understood. So it can be redundant to focus too much on the positives. It’s dependent on the context.

[fresh bane]

I don't think the point is focusing on what's bad on a game you love vs what you really liked, though it's a proven fact that people focus more on negative aspects

[mossy flume]

Sometimes the negatives are the context

[fresh bane]

It's more the simple fact that you CAN and people DO critique stuff they love

[mossy flume]

Highlighting negatives does not inherently detect from what makes something great

It’s critique

[slim thorn]

I'm honestly not sure what Cap was going for but I don't think much of this conversation was about any specific thing Cap said

[arctic fern]

cap i LOVE totk
but i complain about the small things i dont like because of that love
i dont need to repete the fact that the fuse mechanic is amazing, or that ultrahand gives you fun options, or that the dungeons are great, because everyone already knows that, i dont need to repeat it or only talk about it

[river veldt]

i wasn't even thinking of TotK

[gaunt marten]

The more you think about something the easier it is to notice all the details about it, good and bad ones

[arctic fern]

i have more to SAY about the stuff i dont like

[mossy flume]

It was just an example

[fresh bane]

for Skyrim specifically people tend to have a bunch of critiques for pretty much every aspect of that game and yet people still seem to be very charmed and drawn to the world and atmosphere and just the feel of that game in general despite all that stuff

[arctic fern]

i know but its the easy example

[fresh bane]

the community and modding aspect of Skyrim also helped a bunch in keeping the game alive

[river veldt]

i just don't understand it i guess. ive never felt any need to critique anything i love before. different mindset i guess

[fresh bane]

Because even stuff we love has flaws

[slim thorn]

when I was first getting deep enough into gaming to hear of Skyrim, I pretty much immediately heard the "wide as an ocean, shallow as a puddle" take (pretty sure it was those exact words from multiple sources) and that was more or less all I heard for many years

[mossy flume]

In my case , critique forms after I’ve completely and thoroughly enjoyed something and continued to obsess over it. Over time I get a deeper understanding of the thing and gradually gain ideas on how the thing can be improved.

[arctic fern]

(because its true lol)

[river veldt]

i wasn't saying the things i love don't have flaws !

[mossy flume]

Yeah that’s the same take I heard and it’s my take as well

[arctic fern]

there IS good stuff in skyrim but its butter spread over too much bread

[mossy flume]

But yes it is a different mindset. I didn’t used to critique anything I was obsessed with when I was much younger. I do these days though, partly as an exercise, partly as a result of broader perspective, partly as a desire to learn more.

[fresh bane]

which is why people mod the SHIT out of Skyrim

[arctic fern]

the point is that you're allowed to dislike aspects of things you love, and critique is voicing those complaints in a meaningful way

[mossy flume]

I didn’t get the critique mindset for a while either

[river veldt]

i don't get it all, but whatever

[arctic fern]

it shows a depper understanding of why everything else works too, once you know where it falls short
it helps you understand yourself and the things you like and why you like them

[mossy flume]

Honestly it’s fine if you don’t get it. Not everyone cares for it and that’s fine.

[visual hill]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XBnUcETsxxs
the game that features a X on the first level's building (and takes place in 2023 too :P) now has a PC port

interesting, I see a different thumbnail in the Discord embed than on other sites or on YouTube itself

[dapper cedar]

oh fk I haven’t played that yet

if ever there was a way to play it for the first time tho…

[river veldt]

ive never played Perfect Dark, is it good ?

i know Rare made it but that's about it

[mossy flume]

I hear it was innovative at the time

[gaunt marten]

Man

[river veldt]

woman

[slim thorn]

I remember hearing about Perfect Dark Zero when that came out, but never got around to reading up on it or the original

[gaunt marten]

My wishlist has so many garbage games. What was I thinking when I added them?

[mossy flume]

I’ve heard nothing but praise for it but I don’t know anything about it

[visual hill]

PD is pretty ahead of its time in a lot of ways

right now, I would still recommend 1964GEPD to play it (also for GoldenEye), but the PC port is promising

[dapper cedar]

I’ve played some of Goldeneye and had fun with it, though what I think would be my personal definitive way of going about playing it is unavailable for my GPU

[visual hill]

the issue with PD is that it ran like ass on N64, but this is a non-issue with emulation nowadays

[dapper cedar]

that being Xenia with the mouse hook and a certain mystery version of Goldeneye that AMD doesn’t seem to like

[visual hill]

there is also a Xbox 360 remaster of Perfect Dark, but it has some issues (especially if playing with a controller due to the huge deadzone which you can't tweak)

it was made by 4J Studios, the same studio that handled Minecraft's first console port on the same platform

[dapper cedar]

aye that’s the one, someone made a unique Xenia so you can play it with keyboard & mouse

[river veldt]

whoa

[dapper cedar]

reminding me I’ve got this, though not in the best shape

[visual hill]

I've played the XBLA version on Xenia (I defeated Xenia using Xenia), it's pretty good but visuals are a bit dark due to the textures themselves. I also had an issue where the game crashed whenever I switched to the grenade launcher, which doesn't prevent completion but makes it a bit fiddly

[arctic fern]

absolute classic

[dapper cedar]

never been able to unsee the gun in Bond’s elongated mouth

[river veldt]

it's annoying that old games came in cardboard boxes

[quiet swift]

Ah yes, the giant mouth

[river veldt]

though iirc most manuals encouraged you to throw away the box and just keep the cartridge back then lol

[dapper cedar]

also is the only Bond movie I’ve seen

[river veldt]

ive seen

uh

No Time To Die

the most recent one

[visual hill]

I haven't seen any, but if I had to watch one, I would surely pick GoldenEye

[slim thorn]

I've seen several Bonds over the years, but don't remember a lot of them

[visual hill]

I saw some excerpts because it was on TV a few weeks ago, funny how I can recognize the game scenes when they occur

[river veldt]

it was alright but didn't hit me too hard considering i hadn't seen any others

[astral steeple]

perfect dark being mentioned reminded me of another really good shooter on n64

[river veldt]

Conker's Bad Fur Day

oh

[visual hill]

I was disappointed that Bond didn't complete Facility using speedrun strats.

[dapper cedar]

IIRC the dam level is only like the first minute or so of the actual movie

[slim thorn]

the ones I do remember are the recent Craig era, and the original Connery era because I rewatched some of those; of those ~10 I'd recommend From Russia With Love and Skyfall

[dapper cedar]

one could call the game an extended cut

[arctic fern]

wel the whole game is slightly longer than a bond movie

[river veldt]

i tried playing Goldeneye on the N64 emulator on Switch and i forgot that the N64 controller had one analog stick so aiming and moving was weird

[slim thorn]

(but I don't think Bond movies and Bond games have much to do with each other as far as recommendations go, it was never the most plot-focused franchise)

[dapper cedar]

i remember playing splitscreen MP in one of the original Xbox 007 games with my brother

not sure which it was, vaguely remember a docks map I think?

[river veldt]

remember the island that people thought you could go to

but it was just set dressing

[slim thorn]

I know I played a 007 game (not Goldeneye) at some point but I'm not sure which one, I think it just faded into the background along with most other okay shooters of the era

[visual hill]

Nightfire? That one is quite popular in its console version, specifically GameCube as it's 60 FPS

(PC version however…)

[dapper cedar]

Nightfire sounds familiar

[visual hill]

Everything or Nothing is also quite well-regarded

[river veldt]

i didn't even know there were other James Bond games besides Goldeneye

[visual hill]

there are a lot more, many of them are worth checking out

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8kB68DGwO0

[astral steeple]

there was a few on the ps1

one of them i remember had a snowy type level on the multiplayer mode

[dapper cedar]

Oh oh I found it

it was Agent Under Fire, specifically this map
https://youtu.be/98OIyIB9GuM

[slim thorn]

lol, I had no idea there was a Bond text adventure

[river veldt]

i remember at the end of No Time To Die i was convinced that Bond was somehow going to make it off the island and survive

[arctic fern]

it was a genuine shock

to me atleast

[slim thorn]

I liked that part yeah

[dapper cedar]

another loose memory shaken, so glad I have the opportunity to share the most zany version of the Bond theme I know
https://youtu.be/B7Nfj2Yj6G8

[visual hill]

I tried out Fade to Black this evening, it does the creepy atmosphere pretty well but the janky controls and confusing level design are too much for me 😦

it's also one of those games whose PS1 version is arguably the best, but it renders level geometry as lines (because it was perspective-correct on original hardware)… which doesn't play well with upscaling in emulation

[arctic fern]

this is the dumbest version of the bond theme i've ever heard
why is there random "aw yeahs" and "hit its"

[visual hill]

the character's animation is top-notch for a 1995 game though

[dapper cedar]

i don’t know but it’s stuck in my head now

[mossy flume]

Sounds like the 80s happened

[arctic fern]

omg they took the "aw" in the "aw yeah" soundclip and set it to the bond theme
amazing

[astral steeple]

https://vxtwitter.com/OWCavalry/status/1689653394208862208

good lord

[thorny loom]

Tf

[arctic fern]

OMG THE "AW YEAH" IS USED HERE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QUNwXd_QeQ

its the same sound bite

[astral steeple]

id never spend that much on a figurine ngl lol

[river veldt]

awwww shit
https://youtu.be/7k7P8HOW7rc

[slim thorn]

watching this Bond series history made me realize I haven't played a shooter since... RE4 remake I guess?

not sure there are any I've been wanting to try though

[river veldt]

ive played Doom Eternal 😎

[astral steeple]

the main shooters i play are pretty much just fort zero build, pubg occasionally, and halo 5

[visual hill]

there's the Quake 2 remaster 👀

I played it a bit with my father today, but he struggles with finding his way in the levels and figuring out where he's attacked from (even with the damage indicator)

[slim thorn]

yeah, I can't explain why, but the Quakes just don't seem like the kind of shooter I'd enjoy

(partly since people almost always talk about the multiplayer part)

[river veldt]

i might replay Quake 1

[slim thorn]

Perfect Dark was originally a GoldenEye sequel!?

no one tells me these things

[visual hill]

yeah, you can feel it throughout the game

it's a spiritial successor

(TimeSplitters did that too, after Perfect Dark)

[slim thorn]

and somehow I ended up playing none of these

[visual hill]

I didn't try any of the TimeSplitters games yet

[astral steeple]

who remembers this game lol

[slim thorn]

I feel like I've seen this somewhere but the name rings zero bells

[visual hill]

the cover reminds me of Haze

[slim thorn]

you're right, that's what I'm thinking of

[astral steeple]

it was a shooter game for 360 and ps3 and pc where you could stop time, slow down time, and rewind time

it was super fun on the multiplayer mode

it was by Saber Interactive

[slim thorn]

that feels like a whole subgenre of shooters at this point

I might've missed all the shooters with a straight-up time manipulation power though

[astral steeple]

it came out in like 2007

[thorny loom]

Yeah back in the whole. Cod clone craze

[astral steeple]

lol

[slim thorn]

oooh, I think Everything or Nothing might be the one Bond I played

I'm about 90% sure I played only the first few levels of it though, the only footage that feels familiar is this part where Bond grapples down a wall into a snowy stone courtyard where a fighter jet crashes and enemies trickle in from all sides

[river veldt]

omg i just remembered that the Arkham Trilogy comes to Switch this autumn

excite

[slim thorn]

do you only play games on Switch these days?

[river veldt]

yeha 🤠

why do you aks

[slim thorn]

just because Arkham's been several on other platforms

[river veldt]

oh yeah

[arctic fern]

its an old game series

[slim thorn]

I think I played Asylum and City on whichever Xbox they were first on?

[arctic fern]

but switch is probably the most convenient wayt o play it now, that or steam deck

[gaunt marten]

City was so good

[river veldt]

it's hard for me to play my games on my computer because i don't like not having my games portably

[gaunt marten]

As a person who rarely plays the tower based open world collectathon genre, I've enjoyed every game I played

[arctic fern]

just like
buy a steam deck
thats totally and afforable and reasonable solution

[visual hill]

refurbished Steam decks are available now too

[river veldt]

i do kind of want one but im saving my next big console purchase for the Switch successor

which is hopefully portable/hybrid agaiin

[arctic fern]

smart tbh probably

[slim thorn]

oh yeah, I don't think that was a genre yet back when Arkham City did it

[arctic fern]

if it takes years to come out you will have a small pile of cash for games

[gaunt marten]

It was not

It was strange and unique

It still is because I refuse to play AAA games unless they're cheap as shit and universally acclaimed

[river veldt]

i like Batman

which is why im excited

[slim thorn]

yeah if you've never played those before you'll have a blast

[river veldt]

i know that Barbara is Oracle instead of Batgirl which is 😔

[astral steeple]

the next nintendo console needs to be called the super nintendo switch ngl

if not its a missed opportunity lol

[arctic fern]

they're... the same person?

or Barbara was A bat girl

[slim thorn]

oh, are you not familiar with the Oracle/Batgirl distinction?

[arctic fern]

apparently not?

[slim thorn]

in most continuities, Oracle is the codename that Barbara adopts (usually after a paralyzing injury) when she takes on the role of tech wizard back at HQ talking to everyone through earpieces, instead of one of the costumed crimefighters on the scene punching people

[river veldt]

yee

[arctic fern]

yeah thats what i meant

[slim thorn]

and she's often cited as one of comics' best representations of a disabled character

[river veldt]

im familiar with Oracle's origin being Killing Joke (cuz that's when Joker shot and paralysed her) but she probably has others i don't know

yeah

[slim thorn]

though this put her in a weird schrodinger's canon state where everyone wants to see both Oracle and Batgirl so the franchise's various reboots and adaptations keep waffling on her status

I'm pretty sure the aftermath of Killing Joke is when the whole Oracle thing first started, yeah

[river veldt]

well there's always Stephanie or Cassandra to take up the Batgirl mantle

[slim thorn]

indeed

[river veldt]

i just randomly remmebred how Barbara was Alfred's neice in "Batman and Robin" instead of Jim's daughter which was a weird change

[slim thorn]

well I've thought of dozens of shooters I haven't played but still nothing grabs me, maybe I'm just not in the mood for them after all

[river veldt]

have you tried DUSK

[slim thorn]

haven't heard of that one

ah it's one of those "boomer shooters"

[river veldt]

yea

really good and fun

[slim thorn]

(nearly finished this Bond game video) it's a little funny and sad how many of the later games get the "feels like Call of Duty" comment from this creator

[sage iris]

Cap I can't believe you played dusk but didn't like ultrakill

[gaunt marten]

Ultrakill is basically Twilight

[sage iris]

With or without the sparkle?

[gaunt marten]

Yeah

[river veldt]

well

idk lol

[static bluff]

Look what you made me do, @unreal idol 🚦

[river veldt]

omg

[gaunt marten]

Dune

[unreal idol]

Hell yes, 61 is right

[river veldt]

Dune ????

[slim thorn]

I have no idea what this is

[unreal idol]

I chose a random map for mine

[gaunt marten]

It's Sim City

[slim thorn]

oh

[gaunt marten]

On the SNES

[river veldt]

yeah

it has Bowser and Mario which makes it the best version

[slim thorn]

huh, I always thought that was a PC series

[gaunt marten]

But I like saying it's Dune because of an inside joke

[river veldt]

oh i see

[river veldt]

yeah this is a port of the original PC version

iirc Nintendo themselves did it

[unreal idol]

It's a really comfy and fun version

I have a lot of nostalgia for it

[river veldt]

yep Nintendo EAD did the port to SNES

[slim thorn]

anyway, finally made up my mind: I'm going to play Kentucky Route Zero next

[river veldt]

oo

[slim thorn]

I'm still feeling too low energy for a twitchy or complicated game so another narrative atmospheric one seems about right

[gaunt marten]

Why do you feel like it's the best decision?

Other than the banger soundtrack

[slim thorn]

I... don't have that many unplayed narrative atmospheric games on me atm?

or did you have something specific in mind

[gaunt marten]

Apparently me neither

https://i.imgur.com/XaMQCJo.png

[slim thorn]

wow I lucked out with those tags

[gaunt marten]

(The other two are bad)

[slim thorn]

gtk

[arctic fern]

it is but they released it on some consoles

[static bluff]

aw yes, captial GET

Mode 7 baby!!!

[slim thorn]

lol

[river veldt]

Mode 7 is the pinnacle of graphics

[hushed onyx]

Typing Chronicles sounds like an educational game…

[gaunt marten]

It's a normal game

You just have to do everything by means of typing and this doesn't help the core gameplay loop

[rose rose]

The core gameplay loop is "typing fast".

Though IIRC that one somewhat weirdly supports controller input, which throws the whole typing concept out the window

[gaunt marten]

Yeah. I should specify it's bad for Ixrec who wants slow atmospheric narrative games.

[river veldt]

typing like the old Space Quest games ?

[slim thorn]

have you played KRZ, or was this backlog comment I accidentally stumbled onto just now based on reputation alone?

[gaunt marten]

Less like the old Space Quest game and more like that one Pokemon typing game

[rose rose]

Things have labels; you type the words on the labels to target them

But I would definitely describe it more "frantic typing" than "atmospheric narrative"

[static bluff]

lol okay this is pretty funny. I built an airport. It immediently caught on fire 😡
But, this tiny bit survived the fire and I guess is good enough??? There go new airplanes

[river veldt]

LOL

[slim thorn]

gotta love small-town rural directions like this

"turn left at the ugly tree that's always on fire"

[robust spear]

https://youtu.be/fpWphs78oGA

[fresh bane]

I haven't played it, no, I've just heard about it and I know it's one of those type of indie games

[slim thorn]

it is certainly those and that's what I'm looking for right now

[fresh bane]

after binging through like 4 Zelda games and other of your indie games you've played a chill laid back experience like this is best

[slim thorn]

considering how quickly it's making me doubt the reality of everything, it is pretty chill actually

if anyone is familiar with KRZ: ||I just got to Act I, Scene IV, my current best guess is we've been talking to a lot of ghosts||

[unreal idol]

Damn you are just flying through it lol

[static bluff]

kinda had the itch to just go ham

i'm at year 1946 and just got metropolis

[slim thorn]

is that a low or a high % for this sort of game?

[static bluff]

ooo a fountain

[gaunt marten]

Very low

[slim thorn]

tough choice

[gaunt marten]

Each floor in order

[river veldt]

wow post war

[teal cliff]

wow it does

did anyone even play Haze? Lol

[teal cliff]

So, something I hadn't thought of before, occurring to me now that I'm playing AC Odyssey again.
Is the common fictional portrayal of the spartans standing up against the evil persian hordes kind of racist?

[white phoenix]

This is based on the Battle of Thermopylae, in which the legend goes that 300 spartans held off against hundreds of thousands of persians in a last stand

This is the intro of AC Odyssey and the focus of the film 300

Now I say legend because although there were probably around 300 spartan hoplites, they were supported by a few thousand more greek soldiers

Additonally, the battle was situated on a narrow width in Thermopylae, which made defending it easier

they only lost because some guy told the persians that there existed another route behind them but not before the rest of the greek alliance could prepare for a defense

Cause at the time, Greece wasn't really a unified country, it was made of different city states, like Sparta, Athens, Corinth, and I think that is somewhat touched upon in the game

they united to defend against the Achaemenid Empire (Persia)

some western sources see it as crucial for the survival of "democracy" and "western culture", and while somewhat true, I think more historians would say that ironically, Persia was actually a way better and moral place to live lol

[teal cliff]

Right but I was specifically thinking about the depiction of the Persians as this evil, brutal horde ala the orcs in LOTR or something
This depiction comes through the most in like, the movie 300

[white phoenix]

This is why I don't like their portrayal in the film 300, which was crucially made in 2007, where because of a few factors going on at the time... which you can guess where I am going with this

They made the persians look kinda stupid

[teal cliff]

Did 300 start that portrayal of them?

I feel like most of the time I see this battle recreated in media it depicts the Persians similarly

[white phoenix]

Maybe of this specific battle, because how else do you portray such a disproportionate battle

[hushed onyx]

It didn’t exactly start this portrayal of them because the Greeks and Romans had negative views of the Persians as well as being decadent and weak.

Though at the same time they respected them as a dangerous opponent.

[white phoenix]

But I get pissed off most about the film's portrayal of Xerxes

like what is that

[teal cliff]

300 also portrayed the Persians as gay, which is fucking hilarious when you consider the protagonists of that movie are the Spartans

[white phoenix]

And you gotta remember that Persia today is literally just Iran

and being made in 2007... yeah

[teal cliff]

"Persians fuck men! We'd never do that! We fuck boys instead!" - Spartans in 300 probably

[white phoenix]

So yeah, to answer your original question, I do think in the specific case of the film 300, there were some iranophobic undertones and was somewhat politically motivated in portraying the manly western looking guys vs a massive army from persia lead by a relatively effeminate guy

the wiki article touches on this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/300_(film)

[teal cliff]

I think that the public image of this battle is unfortunately heavily taken from this movie and depictions like it

so I think that might have done some lasting damage to the public conscious but idk

[white phoenix]

I completely agree

the film put the Battle of Thermopylae in the spotlight of the public conciousness and is what most people think of when they think of that battle and Sparta in general

[hushed onyx]

Same here. I do think it’s worth knowing that the depiction there didn’t really come out of the blue, though.

[white phoenix]

and the game put it as the intro, because everyone knew what it was, and everyone knew what it was because of the film

[hushed onyx]

While the specific package is new, many individual elements are pretty old (Herodotus literally ends with the Persians being explicitly and then implicitly criticized for decadence, for instance)

[random steppe]

I mean, to be fair, Serse was fucking awesome, absolutely gorgeus and like 8 feet tall.
Definitely gay coded but also I wouldn't call it super negative as portrayal.
I had more problems with the portrayal of the more "freakshow" style of persians in the movie.
But yeah 300 is a bit much.

[white phoenix]

while Herodotus was the father of history, he has a reputation for being very dramatic and overembellishing a lot of things

Oh yeah I agree, Xerxes was awesome

I mean, his name is probably my favourite name in history

But I think at the time it was released, it could bring some negative perceptions to him and the persians in general

I had more problems with Xerxes being portrayed as a hilariously evil dude when he was anything but that

[random steppe]

I think the film can be excused if you read it as more of folklore, and it's what it portrays itself.
As in, at the end you learn it's the one eyed dude that it's telling the story in front of the army before the big battle.

But yeah, even under that reasoning it's not great.

Like, of course the story makes the spartan looks awesome and the persians evil.
It's a spartan telling it.

It's like, the one time Zack Snyder kinda used a storytelling device properly, I don't want to take it from him.

[white phoenix]

oh snyder...

unfortunately, the public consciousness of the spartans and the persians will be only seen as that

much to the disdain of anyone who actually studied ancient history

[thorny loom]

I literally only remember this movie for the memes and the era of “this is sparta” remixes on youtube

[white phoenix]

For some people, thats all they think of when sparta is mentioned

I know it was for me for the longest time

[river veldt]

Zack Snyder certainly makes movies

[teal cliff]

I despise him for his take on batman alone

and superman honestly

he doesn't get either

[white phoenix]

yeah like, batman not killing is the whole point of his character and his relationship with his archenemy, the joker

[flint iron]

People trying not to make Superman evil challenge (impossible)

[white phoenix]

at least the new cartoon returns him to his wholesome self

[flint iron]

Yeh, one of my favorite renditions of superman

[teal cliff]

Bats and Supe are not dark or nihilistic characters and presenting edgy stories with them as their default canon is wrong and bad

Evil Superman is supposed to be a deviation from the norm because Clark is normally incredibly good

[fresh bane]

can't say I'm surprised he went in the direction that he went with with Batman considering I'm 99% sure he only really read The Dark Knight Returns if anything
300 was also originally a Frank Miller book too so I guess he likes Frank Miller which I wouldn't be surprised if he did

[teal cliff]

He's said before he doesn't like comic books

This fucking person should not be allowed within the same building as a comic to movie adaptation let alone in the directors chair

[white phoenix]

lmao bruh

[teal cliff]

I guarantee you he did not get Watchmen

he's the type of person to play Warhammer 40k and think the Imperium are super cool

[white phoenix]

"no one is killing each other"
makes batman kill

[teal cliff]

I'm glad DC seems to be going with James Gunn instead of Snyder from now on

Gun's Suicide Squad in 2021 was fantastic

shame the video game got delayed

I hope it's good when it comes out.

[white phoenix]

the video game turned out to be live service, and then everyone started hating on it

guessing that's why it got delayed

[teal cliff]

Well unless the delay is to remove the live service aspect, which I don't expect it to be, people are just gonna need to make their peace with that or not pick it up

[white phoenix]

it's just sad that it's kevin conroy's last performance as batman

[teal cliff]

Doesn't seem sad to me, the dialogue we've seen so far has been fun.

I mean it's sad Conroy passed obviously I just mean it's not sad this is his last performance compared to anything else.

[fresh bane]

the one thing I'll give Snyder is that his over the top style of direction translates very well to a character like Batman, when it comes to the feats he performs, the acrobatics, the coreography, the fighting, the overall spectacle is probably to this day my favourite of any Batman live action and it translates the animated and comic version of the character very well, he also makes him a lot spookier whenever we see him from another character's perspective, and the suit is still the best Batman live action suit too

https://tenor.com/view/bh187-justice-league-dc-batman-drop-in-gif-20843008

[river veldt]

the suit is ok, not my favourite though

[fresh bane]

in isolation, when you're not really thinking about the context of the character and the writing, it's really good

[river veldt]

i like Pattinson's and Keaton's more i think

[teal cliff]

I don't like how the colour palettes of his movies are always grey and grey

[river veldt]

yeah especially for a character like Superman

[random steppe]

Snyder taught me that tiny bat-ears are a big no for me.

[river veldt]

heh

yeah

idk i kinda like it

but longer ears are more my preference

the short ears come from TDKR suit

[random steppe]

I don't need for the ears to be huge, but I have a minimum acceptable lenght and Snyder suit is below it.
I wasn't aware of it until I saw it.

[river veldt]

because as Nire said Zack Snyder has read one Batman comic and that's TDKR

i like the super long ears in the Arkham games

and that one guys art where he makes Batman look like a gargoyle

god i wish i could remember the name

something Kelly i think

[teal cliff]

my favourite appearance for batman is not technically batman but is technically still batman

[fresh bane]

I like all length of ears, Jim Lee usually draws them pretty short so I got used to it but the only thing I don't like about the Batfleck suit are the short ears, I guess it reminds me too much of DD, and Pattinson's ears are more like horns and his cowl's head shape is very weird so I never really liked it that much

[river veldt]

i like how similar Pattinson's is to West's

[teal cliff]

the red death had no right to look this cool

The lightning bolt cutting through the bat symbol on his chest as a combination of the logos? stellar

[river veldt]

whoa

where is his cape

[random steppe]

I had to look at Pattinson suit to remind myself of the lenght and I love that just writing "Battinson suit" and google immedialy understood

[proud warren]

something something "no capes"

[teal cliff]

Are you guys familiar with the Dark Nights Metal various Batmen?

because a lot of them are very cool designs

[river veldt]

no

[teal cliff]

oh damn I gotta show you some. Do you know what Dark Nights Metal is or should I give you a two sentence rundown of the premise

[river veldt]

two sentence

[teal cliff]

Dark Nights Metal is a bunch of alternate universe evil batmen being gathered by Barbatos, lead by The Batman Who Laughs, a version of Batman who became the Joker after killing Joker and getting infected with Joker gas.

[river veldt]

ooh i think ive heard of this

[teal cliff]

The previously shown Batman is The Red Death, a version of Batman who strapped the Flash to the hood of the batmobile to time travel to try to save his parents.

it combined Flash & Bats to make that guy

[fresh bane]

I'm still hoping that some live action or even animated Batman film will use the Rebirth suit design, I think it's my favourite and the perfect modern Batman suit

[teal cliff]

https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/T-DeYaEIwecV0BhSugp5oeqNhdQ=/0x0:494x751/1200x800/filters:focal(219x149:297x227)/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/59189717/DHzKPamU0AADW8y.0.jpg

this is the batman who laughs

[river veldt]

i just want Pattinson to have da yellow utility belt

[teal cliff]

he killed the rest of the bat family and keeps the robins chained up like attack dogs

[river veldt]

oh

[teal cliff]

yeah hes kinda gruesome

Another favourite of mine is The Drowned, a female Batman who lived in a timeline where the surface was at war with Atlantis

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/61+d2L18rRL.jpg

the Dark Nights Metal run has tons of alternate Batmen and some get pretty goofy. One of them is a monster truck.

[river veldt]

lol

[teal cliff]

tl;dr batman went crazy and put his consciousness in all technology to big-brother style monitor the whole world

people fought back and broke every computer except 1; the machine inside of a big ass monster truck, batman's last vestige of consciousness

[fresh bane]

pirate female batman? I vibe with it

[river veldt]

i always thought the Elseworld where Thomas becomes Batman and Martha becomes the Joker was interesting

[teal cliff]

Oh yeah that's Flashpoint right?

[river veldt]

i think so

[teal cliff]

here's the Dawnbreaker, a version of Batman who got a green lantern ring the night Joe Chill killed his parents and used it to brutalize Chill

[river veldt]

whoa

[teal cliff]

by the time the lantern core came to get it back years later, Bruce was way too good with the ring and literally solo'd the whole corps

He killed them all with some weird super attack that was never explained or seen again lol

something about unleashing his inner demons.

[river veldt]

holy hell

[teal cliff]

Another one of the main evil Batmen is the war machine. Bruce uploaded Alfred's consciousness to a computer, CPU Alfred decided the best way to keep Batman safe was to turn him into a computer as well

Then there's The Merciless, Batman who usurped Ares to become the god of war

and the last of the "main" villains, The Devastator. Batman with the Doomsday Virus.

[river veldt]

wow i didn't know there were so many

[teal cliff]

There's tons of other minor evil Batmen (one whos a red lantern, one who was combined with Scarecrow, one who uh... he's a house... no better way to explain it),

but the main cast, so to speak, is Dawnbreaker, Drowned, Red Death, War Machine, Batman Who Laughs, Merciless, and Devastator.

[white phoenix]

I'm sure the lego batman games had some of these right

[teal cliff]

I don't think so?

The problem is that the most prominent among them, Batman Who Laughs, is a brutal character who I do not think is really fit for the lego games lol. Also the run is entirely non canon afaik

And because these are all alternate timeline Batmen, the whole arching plot deals with a lot of time shenanigans I do not believe are very easy to clear up, so not a lot of attention is given to the run.

I think Batman Who Laughs survived the whole ordeal because Barbatos is protecting him but I think the rest are all ded, either due to dying in the conflict or being erased when their little side timeline ended

I think the Batman comics have one of the best extended casts of any comic series and it makes me sad that most major adaptations just focus on Batman and Joker

The rest of the heroes and villains of gotham are so fucking cool. I love Signal.

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/a3/29/e1/a329e1dcd38db13957ef4b75ddf330c3.jpg

look at this guuuuuy I wanna hug him

hes even got the best robin design

[random steppe]

You should definitely join the DC thread we have btw
https://discord.com/channels/98609319519453184/1026644106874732594
I assume you'll be interested in some of the discussions that happen there

[teal cliff]

Potentially

I will joi nthe thread

not sure how active I'll be

[random steppe]

[thorny loom]

https://vxtwitter.com/HazzadorGamin/status/1690008657763659776/photo/1

Fallout 4 next gen update delayed indefinitly

[arctic fern]

what a staggeringly unhelpful post.

[slim thorn]

wow I missed the whole #1026644106874732594 leaking into #1032716748887179434 thing

[slim thorn]

fwiw it has pretty strong bursts of activity whenever one of us (particularly me, Nire or Cap) watches/plays/reads a DC thing, especially since Nire and I have read many Batman comics in the past (I'm almost certain Cap recognized Metal when you brought it up because I referenced it a few times)

[thorny loom]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6AcXxMPzZM

[quiet swift]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGbrRPPAlPU

[wind stump]

YOOOOO
It's the canon weapon from NieR Replicant!

[dire gate]

I understand that BG3 is a good game but I find it baffling how many people go "omg bg3 metacritics 97!!!1!!!! higher than zelda!!111!!!!"

[quiet swift]

I think more than anything it's unexpected for a CRGP, and for anything to dethrone zelda in the first place

[dire gate]

Yeah but also I feel like it is yet another typical overhyping

It has 20 reviews

[slim thorn]

yeah it’s both

[dire gate]

TotK has 145, and also it is known since BotW that there are reviews that solely exist to shit with the score

[slim thorn]

the aggregate number being higher clearly doesn’t mean anything once you compare things like the review count, but most people aren’t naturally skeptical of that

which is why I keep saying a single numerical score is a really bad way to describe a video game, often to the point of being worse than no information at all; that’s clearly not common sense yet

[dire gate]

TotK has 5 mixed reviews. It has 3 70s and 2 60s

It's definitely not a game that deserve 60

Anyway it is so unfortunate to see people doing that, and journalism, yes you, especially you, journalists

[teal cliff]

I'd give it a 60 probably.

[dire gate]

I mean I'm not against giving 60 personally

But giving 60 as a critics score is different with "Oh I don't like this game"

[young creek]

greatest game ever made

[teal cliff]

I'd give it a 60 as a critics score. I think the way it does stamina, consumables, energy cells, and the limiting of the machine parts is anti-experimentation and feels like someone is standing over you hitting you with a pillow whenever you try to have fun

Durability too, almost forgot the most important one.

It limits any exploration of the actual mechanics so much I feel like I never get to interact with them

[dire gate]

Skill Issue

[young creek]

if you have everything maxed at the start theres nothing to progress which wouldnt be very fun

[teal cliff]

Not being able to use weapons, build machines, climb anything, or use items isn't very fun either.

I don't think I was ever able to shield surf for more than 3 seconds in BOTW because everything breaks so easily

[dire gate]

wut

[young creek]

you can do all of that just progress a little

and yeah thats just not true lol

[dire gate]

I mean I do find some of the system to be quite annoying here and there, the game is often surprisingly difficult, but I don't think it's 60 bad

[wind stump]

nier automata is the best game ever made send tweet

[slim thorn]

I never even learned shield surfing was a thing in BotW, and by the time I was aware of it in TotK I could go down a whole mountain easily

[river veldt]

shield sufring is so much fun

[dire gate]

Will I give 100/100? Maybe not, probably not. Will I give 60/100? No

[river veldt]

finding a bigass hill and surfing down it there's nothing like it

[young creek]

Its a 110/100 message approved by the Penn fan club

[river veldt]

true !

[dire gate]

I shield surfed the first rail I saw in TotK and my friend was like "Oh...you could do that I didn't realize"

"Well you know...it was in the trailer..."

[slim thorn]

ah, well, I don't watch trailers

[river veldt]

experimenting is so fun and the best part is most of the time wacky experiments work it's great

[teal cliff]

I shouldn't have to unlock the basic concept of fun

also I did progress, it didn't change

the durability is always too low

the stamina is always too low

the machine parts are always too limited

I never felt like I had enough to do anything

[slim thorn]

the only balance problem I had in TotK is that silver enemies are too spongy, but even that never rose above a nuisance

I always had plenty of all of those things to do much of the stuff I wanted to do

[teal cliff]

BOTW had the same problem and TOTK made it worse by adding the machine parts, energy cells, and limiting bombs now

[slim thorn]

and the stuff I wasn't yet ready for I came back later when I had more of everything

[dire gate]

Want to ask, what kind of game do you personally think that deserves 100, or like at least 95?

(to Justice)

[river veldt]

Super Mario Galaxy 100000/100

[slim thorn]

anyway, this is a perfect example of why no score or review means anything without knowing the author/source it's coming from

[young creek]

super mario galaxy is prett good if you play it on the switch (the wiimote sucks ass)

[dire gate]

Well they don't sell it anymore

[river veldt]

i haven't touched a Wiimote in almost 10 years

i don't really remmeber how it controlled on Wii

[young creek]

I tried to play galaxy 2 on my Wii this year because they didnt put it on switch

it was so unplayable

[dire gate]

Remember shaking the wiimote to spin

?

[slim thorn]

same, closest I've gotten since the Wii was new is some motion control emulation to an analog stick

[river veldt]

yeah that worked pretty well

[young creek]

no its ass

[slim thorn]

oh yeah that was the one reason I had to keep detaching the sides of my Switch to play Odyssey

that was annoying

[river veldt]

i don't remember it being bad at all

[slim thorn]

I mean it's not a big deal if the move is infrequent

but a button press is just better

[young creek]

Me neither but after having a button do it in Galaxy 1 I can never go back

infrequent 😹

[river veldt]

i see

spin is the thing you do most in Galacy

galcy

whatever

[slim thorn]

ah the Odyssey move I needed to shake for was infrequent

[dire gate]

rolling

[river veldt]

what about rolling

[dire gate]

You shake to roll in Odyssey

[river veldt]

you can just mash Y

[young creek]

no you cant, this was the #1 complaint about speedrunning odyssey

you have to shake the controller constantly

[teal cliff]

I don't think I'd give any game a 100 but a 95 would probably be I Was a Teenage Exocolonist

[river veldt]

im literally playing the game right now yes you can

[slim thorn]

I've already forgotten the details of the Odyssey controls

[dire gate]

Interesting, never heard of that game, what kind of game is it?

[river veldt]

you can do almost any move (except for hat tossup or down) without motion controls

[slim thorn]

oooh the hat toss

[young creek]

"The biggest and most obvious one is the roll boost. Getting around as Mario is fastest while in a roll, and by pressing the Y button or shaking the right Joy-Con, he does a little “hop” that also gives a tiny speed boost. Except you only get this speed boost once every second or two when you use the Y button, and get the speed boost every time when shaking the Joy-Con."

[slim thorn]

(fwiw I did hear briefly of Exocolonist, but it's not my genre)

[teal cliff]

Visual novel with exploration + card game elements

[young creek]

so it works like the other motion controls in odyssey, better version of pressing the button

[river veldt]

i don't think a casual player cares about the brief second where you can't press Y to go faster in a roll

[young creek]

no

its obviously way better than in galaxy 1-2

but doing the cat throw up was annoying

cap 🙂

[river veldt]

cat throw up

[slim thorn]

I still don't remember exactly what moves were involved, but I'm pretty sure there were some moons in Odyssey I could not get without motion controls

[river veldt]

i can't think of any

[teal cliff]

I think another game I'd give a 95 to would be Hades. Can't really think of any more.

I can think of plenty of 90s

[chilly mural]

Crazy Bus

[static bluff]

omg crazy bus

Great song

[chilly mural]

[visual hill]

Quake 2 64 has this map with an ice pool. You know what that means? Quake 2's ice physics put to their full extent

if you think bunnyhopping is ridiculous, it's nothing compared to ice physics

this is like, the biggest reason to play it on PC, can't do that on N64 🙂

you can also do this trick to attack some enemies from behind by performing the rest of the level in reverse

[fresh bane]

haha let's revive the arena fps genre
as a meme that will be such a funny joke

[teal cliff]

can we please get a pve hero shooter

[fresh bane]

quake had a remaster or something recently if I'm not mistaken, I wonder why I never seem to hear much fuss about Quake considering how legendary it is

[river veldt]

yeah the Quake 2 remaster came out recently

im hoping for some new Quake game news at QuakeCon but it seems unlikely

[slim thorn]

I usually hear some fuss about it whenever people are getting nostalgic for id-era shooters in general

[river veldt]

Quake 1 is extremely good but i haven't pllayed any of the others

[visual hill]

obligatory "I just found the BFG" moment

[river veldt]

whao

[fresh bane]

https://tenor.com/view/doomguy-evil-grin-gif-20903082

[visual hill]

Quake 2's BFG is probably my favorite for a few reasons, the Quake 3 BFG is boring but also effective (it's just a sped up rocket launcher)

[fresh bane]

the fun starts now

[visual hill]

compared Doom, the Quake 2 BFG traces enemies continuously and it also allows you to BFG-jump with it

(costs a lot of health, but it gets you pretty far)

[fresh bane]

I remember seeing a video about the original BFG's design which was pretty much just a faster plasma rifle iirc

[fickle garnet]

We need a quake reboot like what they did with doom

[visual hill]

Calinou cratered.

[fresh bane]

a new quake or a new arena fps would be fun I think

though something tells me maybe people don't like this type of shooter that much if that genre of shooter hasn't been too big exactly

[sage iris]

ULTRAKILL enters the chat

[slim thorn]

there's been a whole "boomer shooter" revival in recent years

it's not my thing, but there's enough of them now that I've seen top 5 or top 10 lists

[river veldt]

Doom Eternal is basivally an arena shooter

[fickle garnet]

I love boomer shooters

[fresh bane]

I've never actually played Ultrakill... I only really saw stuff about it, but I don't remember if it was online or not

[fickle garnet]

I played the Ultrakill demo and it was super fun

[sage iris]

It's singleplayer but extremely good and definitely worth playing

[river veldt]

they need to bring the Lovecraftian theming back

[fresh bane]

really? like which ones?

all I can think of right now is Dusk which I remember people really liked

[river veldt]

DUSK is excellent

[visual hill]

Quake Champions is still playable today, but the skill floor is quite high (not as high as Quake Live though)

one issue with arena shooters is keeping them fun for casual players. I don't think that aspect has really been mastered in the last 10 years

[river veldt]

forgot about Champions

[slim thorn]

since I don't follow this genre at all you're probably better off googling it

[fickle garnet]

I am bad at Quake

[slim thorn]

looking through the names that pop up when I google it, I've heard of Dusk, Ultrakill, Ion Fury, Amid Evil, and of course the actual Dooms/Quakes/etc, but aside from the modern Dooms I haven't played any of this

[visual hill]

arena shooters tend to be at their best when played competitively, with strategies such as timing items, trickjumping, etc. The difference between a skilled player and a casual player is very, very high, and there isn't always teamplay to save you like in Counter-Strike

[river veldt]

Quake 1 rocket launcher best video game rocket launcher ever

[visual hill]

in a team game, if you play poorly, your team might carry you anyway. The larger the team, the more likely this is to be the case

(Battlefield-style games work very well for this purpose)

[slim thorn]

yeah, arena shooters are the epitome of what I do not want to play

[fresh bane]

Ah, so it's the same situation as fighting games then

Got it

[visual hill]

Quake 3 has a very nice rocket launcher, but it's technically nerfed compared to Q1. Still very useful as a daily driver, the main meta weapons in that game are rocket/lightning/railgun

[teal cliff]

Never stopped fighting games.

[fresh bane]

It actually did lol

many times

[fickle garnet]

I'd probably be better if i was on m&k

Instead of controller

[fresh bane]

One of the biggest struggles fot fighting games is retaining casual audiences and making the games fun and learnable for casuals

[visual hill]

yeah, I am a bit scared of playing something like TFH online

[river veldt]

i'd be concerned if a Quake game didn't have a good rocker launcher

rocket

[fresh bane]

That's why virtually every new fighting game is trying some new mechanics to help new or casual players

[visual hill]

I don't spend time learning fighting game strageties, etc. I probably could but it's a time investment

(same for Smash :P)

[slim thorn]

fighting games lost me when I was a teenager and I haven't even looked since lol

even Smash I couldn't make heads or tails of

[fresh bane]

It is, fighting games is something that, just like with Quake I imagine, you have to really really like and enjoy if you want to get good

Not that you can't enjoy it casually but there's a lot to learn and it just takes time and practice

...and a lot of reading in forums and watching videos or well at least that's what you used to do
SF6 has some pretty excellent tutorials even going in depth about fighting game mechanics that as crazy as it may sound, not that many fighting games even have

good tutorials have always been a bit of a struggle in fighting games until very recent

[visual hill]

learning strategies probably became more important in the last 10 years with the rise of esports, competitive gaming, etc

[slim thorn]

I remember some random video I watched years ago praising Skullgirls for having tutorials that went into more depth than which button is jump and which is punch, and how this should not be a rarity

[visual hill]

if I wanted to play Smash at my local esports bar (even "casually"), I'd have to play the game the way it's played competitively

[dire gate]

Fighting game is one of the worst genres in term of new player retention

The way how it is structured is inherently anti-newbie

And it gets worse as higher skill level players get better

[teal cliff]

Yeah but that's just how the genre is, the fighting game community itself seems to be against the idea of changing that

so I guess thats never going to improve.

[fresh bane]

not wrong

it really was that bad

and that's without even going into more abstract and complex fighting game concepts like the ever elusive footsies

[visual hill]

L-canceling is when you cancel your opponent on Twitter for picking Luigi.

[teal cliff]

I think at the base level fighting games need more simple control options and auto combos

beyond all the technical game knowledge, the mechanical skill and practice required to even play at a really low level in fighting games is unreasonable to ask someone who does not want to play it as their main game, or at least main genre

[slim thorn]

I'm pretty sure I'm just physically incapable of playing a fighting game even if I did attempt to put the time into it

my hand-eye coordination or reflexes or whatever the fancy term is has just never been good enough to hit precise timing windows in any genre

[teal cliff]

Same, but I'm also actually blind.

[slim thorn]

there's a reason I keep saying that I suck at parries in every game that has a parry button; so far it's just empirically true