Brothers: Tale of 2 sons (PC):
It's an okay game i guess.
Alright, not just "okay", it's very well made, good puzzles, good artstyle, everything works and it does well on it's "controlling two characters simultaneously" gimmick.
But it's just so derivative from ICO from gameplay to types of puzzles you solve!..
Another problem is characters speaking some imaginary make-believe babble (like in Animal Crossing). I think this is devaluing their story. If they wanted to go full artsy-fartsy and make a game without any words -- they should have done exactly so, instead of making characters going "lalalala-nanana-bububu" all the time.
Or if they wanted to make it sound natural but still make it so player doesn't understand the speech -- they could have used some real language, like Danish or Icelandic or something obscure like that.
And because that they're speaking nonsense, characters HAVE to exaggeratedly emote and overact to compensate for speech not carrying any meaning, which makes it look like a cheap puppet show.
Some great looking locations tho.
Giants' battlefield looked especially haunting.
Pinball Arcade (free version on Steam):
Because i have one of my monitors on work in portrait mode (more optimal for coding), i decided that i might as well use the opportunity to play some games that are designed for vertical layout, like vertical shmups or pinball games.
I played a LOT of Zen Pinball on 3DS (still my favourite version and STILL one of the best uses of 3d) and knew of Pinball Arcade but never tried it before.
While Zen Pinball designs their own tables from scratch, PA team is all about being realistic and licensing and re-creating real tables. I personally don't have much of a history playing pinball myself (hard to do that growing up in SU), but i know of several famous pinball tables thanks to
CGR.
It plays great in vertical mode. And you get a free table, that's nice (Zen Pinball on 360 and Wii U doesn't, though i got a free Mars table when i downloaded the game from Windows 8 store few years ago).
Can be the physics being different from Zen Pinball or my work PC having a weak video card, but there is a lag of some sorts. It takes a fraction of seconds for bumpers to react and overall it feels a tad more sluggish.
Free table (Arabian Nights) is pretty cool, but i wish other tables weren't so expensive. And you can only buy them in bundles or in pairs or something. I specifically looked up Black Hole and it was 7$ or 10$ which is a bit too rich for me (getting Zen Pinball on 3DS with four tables for 4 or 5 bucks might have spoiled me). Especially with the way how my local currency keeps decreasing in value and my potential online purchases keep getting more and more expensive with literally each day...
Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance (PC):
This is a badly designed game. And the deeper you go the more flaws and gaping design mistakes you see. Terrible camera and awful lock-on mechanic is but a beginning in a long line of MGR's mistakes.
Game is too stun happy, enemies can stun or grab you and you get "waggle the stick" QTE which is always annoying in action games and is especially bad in here because how long it takes you to recover. At least in Bayonetta you could recover instantly by parrying incoming attack even when you were caught in some trap status effect, but you can't do this in MGR and will have just take a hit.
Enemy design is also varying shades of terrible. Game balance caters to much into you baiting enemies doing some attack that is vastly preferable for you while some attacks are so bad you might as well restart right here and there and wait until almighty RNG gives you enemy behavior that you want. You are at the mercy of enemy AI. Which is completely contradictory to the entire idea of action games where you are the god that controls the battlefield and if you have the skill for it, you can respond to anything your enemies throw at you.
Then there is leveling up weapons mechanic. This ruins game balance on both ends of player-designer relationship. For player: why bother learning the game if you can just upgrade your blade to level 5 and be overpowered? And for game designer: why bother designing bigger challenge for player on harder difficulty if you can just boost enemy HP to accommodate that your sword can have 5 times more damage points than in the beginning?
Leveling up in RPGs is a mechanic that provides sense of progression and rewards player for time spent by simply increasing some arbitrary number in the system.
While in proper action game design all progression happens in
player's mind. Player learns new tricks and hones his skills and reflexes. There are no artificial barriers like grinding gates, once you acquired proficiency in that game you can start a new save file and beat the game 100% in one go, without needing some kind of late game equipment.
MGR is only balanced with one difficulty in mind -- Hard mode. Starting from Very Hard there is zero balance, just enemies having 10x HP and 10x attack power. There was so little balancing consideration made for Very Hard and Revengeance modes, VH is ended up harder than the last difficulty mode -- Revengeance.
I made a mistake thinking i can beat this unfair mode by entering Revengeance difficulty with non-upgraded sword and no late-game weapons. It was a shitfest.
On Revengeance mode with standard equipment your damage output, your mobility options, game's camera are all inadequate. Regular slash with level 1 blade does less than 1% to bosses.
Less than one percent. Dodge move is way too slow for you to dodge when more than one enemy keep relentlessly attack you forcing you into endless parry war that you can't escape from. Camera reaches new levels of videogame sabotage when all enemies are 100% aggressive and keen to attack you all at once from all sides.
I spent almost a week trying to S-rank first level. Somewhere in the middle i realized this is a fool's errand, but by this time you would rather finish this "as is" rather going through it all over again. I scraped by most of S-ranks by getting "no damage" bonus on regular missions (because with that lacking equipment i inevitably fail a few requirements on some missions). Mission with two helicopters was a complete randomfest. I only S-ranked it because I baited one helicopter's missiles into another which destroyed it instantly and then after just killed remaining Hammerhead.
And then Mistral at the end was an entirely new levels of bullshit times ten.
First of all -- she is too slippery and likes to jump away and do her unstoppable disorienting wheel attack. To stop her from doing that you always need to get up to her face and do specific combination of slashes and blade mode to bait her to attack instead of slipping away.
To do ANY damage to her AT ALL you need to Perfect Parry her attack three times in a row crushing her staff, only after that you get to damage her finally. To do perfect parry just once you need to parry within 5 frames of her attack. That's 1/12 of a second. And you have to do this THREE TIMES IN A ROW just to even START to do ANY damage.
Oh and just wailing at her while she lost her staff and is vulnerable not gonna work because of minuscule damage output of level 1 blade (>1% of her health).
The only way to do considerable damage to her is bait her into running up to one of the tripods that run around us and throw them at me. Then i have to Perfect Parry that swing again while standing near to her to do 20-30%.
If that is not enough, positioning myself near tripods is very dangerous because of how grab happy tripods are. Depending on AI tripod might jump at you at any random moment incapacitating you and ruining S-rank.
I finally managed to luck myself into doing all this, but i am not doing this again.
I will grind and buy all the possible overpowered weapons to cheese my way through remainder or RV difficulty from now on, because i have had it with this game.
I watched several playthroughs of Revengeance difficulty and none of them
even attempted to do this insanity -- going into RV mode with level 1 blade and no late-game weapons. All of them used ripper mode, pincers, sais and had fully upgraded health and energy -- while i had none of that. And these guys are better than me!
Ugh.
Have a nice screenshot. It's from VR missions:
Also playing: Stealth Bastard Deluxe (got all S-ranks up to world 6), Bayonetta 1 (70% into Pure Platinum Non-Stop Infinite Climax run).
Topic: What are you playing? (Read 700401 times)
