Merus

Phaedrus' Street Crew
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Posts posted by Merus

  1. Posted

    I think your points about where Bennett Foddy's interests and blindspots lie were very good. What I was driving at was that the market is far too large for the 80s and 90s model of hard games to ever be the dominant form of video games, because nothing can be. And meanwhile we've learned about people who have quite serious disabilities playing games, and so the model of, say, Space Quest, where it's mostly not time or reflex dependent except for some sequences where it is and you can't progress if you don't have them. I don't read Foddy as fetishising difficulty in the way that Salt & Sanctuary or Hyper Light Drifter do. He seems to be reaching for something more... esoteric, and looking at the game and saying 'well, fuck that' is an intended and acceptable response. (I think the Dark Souls series does the same thing: its world and story seem to suggest that giving up partway through is a satisfying and complete end to the story the game is telling.)

  2. Posted

    I did like the comment I saw from one of the Vlambeer guys that said that he'd really like it if GDQ players would stop sarcastically saying that the game was well-programmed when they exploited a bug.

  3. Posted

    I think it's not a case of Foddy 'forgetting' about low skill players and more that he deliberately made the game for a specific audience. As the trailer says, it's made for a specific kind of person (to hurt them). If you don't get anything out of the game because you don't have an artificially inflated idea of how good you are at games, that's fine, you're just not in the audience for it.

  4. Posted

    I have quite the collection of board games at this point (and yet the one that ended being best value was Tsuro: a short up-to-8-player game turns out to be perfect for what we want, which is 'something we can play now that's zero commitment while we wait for others to arrive').

     

    Codenames is, I think, a breakout hit. You could put that games on shelves next to Monopoly and people would have a fantastic time. I had my worst ever game of Codenames on New Year's Eve, playing with the new girlfriend of a friend of mine, who as it turns out really does not know him well and kept steering us onto the assassin. It was fantastic which is what's so good about Codenames (the fact I was a little drunk certainly didn't help either, but come on who decides to say that Godzilla is an alien, really)

     

    I bought Gloomhaven as part of a Kickstarter and it came in a box that contains its own expansion. It's a dungeon-crawler with a surprisingly well-written campaign, but it's thought carefully about the moment-to-moment mechanics and has built a game that's fun to play on that level, and then added all this crazy campaign and legacy stuff on top. The basic interaction is that you have a hand of cards and you play two each round, and when it's your turn, you do the top of one card and the bottom of the other, but you don't exactly know what everyone else is doing until after you put your cards down. So there's an element of improvisation and some tough decisions: once you run out of cards you reshuffle then lose one for the rest of the game, so you start having to get real clever with the tools you still have. It's co-op to a point, which I love.

  5. Posted

    I'm going to quibble with the premise of the article: there's a pretty clear consensus that people didn't think the casino planet plot was properly connected to the rest of the film, and I can see that if that's how you feel, the film is going to be fatally flawed for you.

     

    It's difficult these days to really say that people are attacking a strawman - for every stupid-ass opinion out there, you can probably find someone who has it - but it's not really addressing any of the complaints about the film other than the ones it can use to support its argument. I'd suggest the people making those particular complaints are probably open misogynists, so it's not that insightful to demonstrate that an complaint they're making is rooted in misogyny.

     

     

  10. Posted

    14 hours ago, TychoCelchuuu said:

    The first time I really really liked it, but it definitely felt a little disjointed and packed to the gills with lots and lots of stuff. The second time it really held together as one focused, cohesive whole.

     

    I'm hearing this a lot and I think it's really interesting that it's a movie that seems to work for people a lot more a second time around.

  11. Posted

    It sounds like people generally like it more the second time they see it, which I think speaks to the criticisms of the The Last Jedi being more in terms of thwarted expectations rather than the film itself.

     

    Re: Luke:

    Spoiler

    The biggest criticism seems to be that Luke is poorly characterised? The problem with this is that if Luke hadn't changed, if he was a Jedi master for thirty years or whatever and was happy to help whenever the galaxy needed him, there wouldn't be a plot for the new trilogy. (Thrawn is not a plot.) He certainly wouldn't have stayed on the far reaches of the galaxy as established in TFA. This way, they have an opportunity to tie in the prequels, or at least the interesting ideas from the prequels about Anakin bringing balance to the force by destroying the rigid, joyless husk that were the Jedi Order.

     

    It was sad when Han Solo was still a bounty hunter thirty years later. Luke and Leia, at least, felt like they'd actually had 30 years of life, offscreen. It did feel, underneath, like he was the same character, just filtered through a lot of trauma and doubt and failure (and other stuff) that comes to the fore first.

     

  12. Posted

    What Remains of Edith Finch is a bit more morbid than I like, and there are certainly a couple of scenes where as soon as I loaded in and saw what was about to happen, I did genuinely say 'oh no, nooooo' out loud, but it's bold and confident and brilliant. It takes one of the things games do best, putting the player directly into a character's head and using the abstraction to express how they think and not what they see, and pushes it further than I've seen any game do. Games like Psychonauts and Persona 4 show glimmers of how powerful this technique can be, but Edith Finch uses it as bedrock and it works.

     

    No amount of random incidental text lying around would have gotten the personality of the Finches across, how much they revel in their own misfortune, as much as walking in their shoes does.

  13. Posted

    The problem with Snake Pass is that it starts demanding you pay attention to the snake's body having weight that the head is not in control of by about the water world, so by the fire world if you're not able to reliably hold onto a scaffold you're going to have a bad time. But it may never occur to you that this is what's happening! It took me a while to work out.

     

    In the air world, I was flinging myself off cliffs, confident that I'd be able to grab onto some bamboo and hold myself there. There's still some bits I think are overtuned, but being able to essentially jump, as a snake who can't jump, makes you feel so goddamn accomplished by the end.

  14. Posted

    It turns out I did not play enough games from 2017 to have ten (in this year of bountiful games, I mostly spent time catching up on a backlog!), so my top 3 are Hollow Knight, which I consider the best Metroidvania ever made, yes even better than that one; Horizon Zero Dawn, which had a beautifully realised world, and who could still throw out surprising fights right up until the end, and Snake Pass, which broke my brain in a delightful way and which I just devoured.

     

    I did not buy a Switch.

  15. Posted

    Quote

    That's false because you noticed it in this movie, and I think that shows that I'm right about how people only notice this stuff when they dislike the movie for other reasons and they start searching around for something to justify their dislike and they settle on plot holes.

     

    Yeah, as someone who doesn't really care for Star Wars, let me assure all readers that the bullshit you are complaining about here is in no way out of character with the other Star Wars movies. The trench run doesn't make any fucking sense in A New Hope either. Empire is better at it, but Empire is not staring at you and pouring the milk down the sink like this film is.

     

    For a movie I was fairly luke-warm on, it's weird how much it's stuck in my head.

  16. Posted

    Agree with BigJKO.

     

    Spoiler

    This extends to the villains, as well - the villains' weaknesses, what makes them villainous, is that they're not willing to admit the possibility of failure. Snoke straight up says that he will never be betrayed, right before he is betrayed. Kylo wants to erase the past, erase every regret, every mistake, in an effort to build a future that is exactly the way he wants it.

     

  17. Posted

    I saw it. It's a Star Wars, and other than Rogue One, a Star Wars has the narrative heft of tissue and is mostly about characters running around and doing things

     

    Spoiler

    Honestly I think the Finn and Rose plot, as incidental as it seems, ends up being pretty important, in two ways: firstly, it kind of blows up the premise of the series, by showing that all those fun smugglers and ne'er-do-wells profit from the suffering and war. The Rebellion might be fighting for peace but they're dependent on people who absolutely do not want to it happen, and if you're going to have peace, for good, you need to deal with that. Snoke isn't the Big Bad we were led to believe. (Watch, though, as JJ Abrams completely fails to pick up on this.) Secondly, it fills in Poe: he's not just impulsive but actively harmful to the cause outside of being a pretty great pilot. The vast majority of the on-screen casualties on the Rebel side were collateral damage from plans he was responsible for. The movie primes us to see this by having him demoted after the cool battle scene where they lose all their bombers taking down one destroyer. The transport plan was a good plan that would have worked if he hadn't encouraged Finn and Rose onto that First Order ship.

     

    But then, basically everyone in this movie gets smashed by the unintended consequences of their actions. What kind of annoys me is that it's spread around equally, which means that Rey, our main hero and the one who's supposed to be the wisest of our heroes (other than Leia), doesn't really get to demonstrate that she's learned anything. It's sort of there? She's the only one who really accepts and vocalises what she'd rather not accept, that she's an orphan without a place, and I guess by assisting the remnants of the Rebels she's making a place as a Jedi, buuuuuut that's pretty weak tea.

     

    It is very pretty, though.

  19. Posted

    On 03/09/2017 at 12:38 PM, feelthedarkness said:

    Hey all, help! End of the month is my annual 24 hour nerd-a-thon some friends and i have been throwing for 25 years, and I need movie recommendations.

     

    Preferred parameters:

    Newish (or newly found/released (Samurai Cop was a fun hit when it was resurrected))

    Remarkable/Unusual/Terrible/Disturbing/Weird! Ultra violence is A-Ok, salacious torture and/or sexual violence is not! 

    Ideally not streaming on common services (but this is an older rule and obviously getting harder to abide)

     

    Previous hits: Hard to Be a God, Upstream Color, Turkish Star Wars, Neil Breen's Double Down, Hard Ticket to Hawii, The Visitor, The Raid

     

    I've slacked a bit this year, so far I only have Neil Breen's latest: Pass-Thru


     

     

     

     

    I think I'm still helpful: a friend of mine specialises in questionable film marathons, and the most recent one of these he put on had Zardoz, Antiviral, and R100. I don't know if I could in good conscience recommend anyone watch R100, even though it ends with an army of dominatrixes slowly advancing on a house, but Zardoz is hilariously bad and Antiviral was actually kind of interesting.

     

    All my friends are still scarred by Man-Borg, so there's something that will be memorable, if not necessarily good. (I couldn't make that weekend, and it sounds like I dodged a bullet.)

  20. Posted

    There's an upgrade early on that gives you better energy regen that's extremely helpful when you're getting a handle on the combat. But it's a game that has an expectation; it's not as demanding, or as unfair, as Dark Souls is, but like Dark Souls if you don't rise to the challenge you're going to get nowhere. It gives exploration a pleasing tension, and does encourage you to try elsewhere if an area is unnerving, but I can respect that it's not for everyone.

  21. Posted

    Have I mentioned Hollow Knight?

     

    It is the best Metroidvania ever made.

     

    That it does this with a fairly rote moveset for your main character tells you that what's doing the heavy lifting here is the world and system design. Friends, it performs admirably. The world is enormous and filled with things to see and experience, and it's a game filled with collectibles where every single one feels hard-won and valuable and memorable. There are areas of the game that are legitimately unnerving. I could not tell you what the critical path is outside of a few key events, and there's several critical events the game seemed to make no effort whatsoever to steer me towards, so everything I found I felt like I had earned. There are entire areas that aren't on the critical path, and as a result they're only filled with boss fights, and beautiful, unique rooms, and surprises. Its main upgrade system are 'charms', which are basically badges from the Paper Mario series, except each badge comes from a specific place with its own backstory, so your inventory of charms are memories of the things you've seen and done.

     

    These aren't connected thoughts, really: what they've made is a metroidvania that puts exploration of a space and a culture front and centre, and builds a game where that is exciting and tricky and rewarding.

  22. Posted

    I beat Horizon Zero Dawn! I liked it a lot, although I felt like there was probably a little too much game there spread a little too thinly. I liked how I could turn off all the UI guff and just look around at the world, except I got frustrated with how few secret ruins there actually were to be discovered in the open world (there are two, and they're right at the start, and every other one is a story objective) so I sort of cheated.

     

    But still! The writing was reasonable, the world-building is very nice, it's beautiful as heck and the game is solid enough systemically that they can just drop a Stormbird or a Thunderjaw down and it's probably going to be an interesting boss battle even if you've fought it five times before. It's fun to just tool around and explore because it's pretty and the game's pretty good at generating emergent scenarios that become stories.

     

    It is not my favourite game this year (that will almost certainly be Hollow Knight, I can't imagine Zelda's going to top it) but it is a game I thoroughly recommend, especially if, like me, you've steered clear of the vast majority of Ubisoft's output.

  23. Posted

    I stopped thinking of it as an open-world game and started thinking of it as an action RPG and it helps. You see all the icons on your map and get fatigued, but 95% of those icons are indicators of what is around and there's very little hoovering up of collectibles. (There are some collectibles. I haven't bought the items that add the collectibles to my map because I'd prefer to finish exploring the world first before I give myself a checklist, and it's paid off because I've managed to stumble across a collectible during a fight.)

  24. Posted

    The sole reason to play Chrono Cross in 2017 is as a historical curiosity. It does some interesting things: you can recruit something like 30 characters, although not all in the same playthrough, and so it has a system where it transmogrifies every character's speech so the translators don't have to write thirty lines for every possible piece of dialogue; it's also an early example of an action point-driven JRPG combat system. It was always the inferior sequel to Chrono Trigger, convoluted where the original was clean, and in 2017 it's clearly a dead end.

     

    Enjoy the original score, and play something better.

  25. Posted

    On 03/07/2017 at 3:18 AM, Tanukitsune said:

    I didn't think I'd be posting here so soon, but... Chrono Cross... Do I even bother to continue?

     

    The combat is boring, the characters are boring and the story is MEH, I'm fighting the hydra and I really can't be bothered to play a single round unless I know this game gets better.

     

    To answer this one months late: no