Bjorn

I'm also about to finish up the third run, but I'm still on Easy. I didn't get all the bobbleheads on the first playthrough, and I didn't want to try and rush plus get those and also check out a couple of other things. Getting the speedrun time down for the last two unlocks has been really easy though, 4 hours is plenty of time once you know what you're doing and you only have to kill the occasional molded. I think I've killed 2 so far, and that was only because they were blocking hallways. How much different is Madhouse in terms of more enemies? Are there like a bunch more, or just some more? I know item placement is all quite different. Though I'm presuming that with the X-Ray specs and the circular saw, that ammo management won't be too bad.

Looks intriguing, the view/light cone reminds me of Monaco (though obviously way different style). I'll be curious to see if it actually pulls off horror well. I can't think of many top down games that I felt actually pulled off real horror, the perspective I think makes it a lot more challenging.

This thread gets neglected because we all get instant kitty fixes in Slack chat now.

If you want to pre-order through Origin, but not sign up for Access, there's currently a 7 day free trial that appears to still get you the 10 percent pre-order discount. Also, we're a month out from release, and they still haven't fucking released the system requirements. What are you doing Bioware?

The Motörhead expansion is real!

I finished a second playthrough on easy, clocked in at just under six and a half hours. Getting sub 4 hours should be easy, because I still fucked around a bunch. Especially since I now have the walking shoes, both defense items and the unlocked handgun. Hoping I can actually bring it in under 3 hours with all that. Speedrunners are already clearing it at near 1.5 hours. Pro-tip for anyone who hasn't played this yet, save your Strong Chem Fluid for the Enhanced Ammo. Strong heals really aren't ever necessary, and Grenade rounds have a few situational uses, but you'll likely find enough to not worry about making more. Enhanced Ammo on the other hand is badass, and I didn't realize that on my first playthrough. I also didn't know that you can combine regular hand gun ammo with Gunpowder to make more Enhanced Ammo. It takes 1 Gunpowder and 10 regular ammo to make 5 Enhanced Ammo, but if you find yourself flush with gunpowder and out of Strong Chem Fluid, I think the tradeoff is worth it.

I'm definitely pre-ordering it and signing up for the early access, so I'll be happy to drop my reactions in here once that happens. Though I really don't plan on spending any time in SP, Imma dump all 10 hours into multiplayer because I want to know if it's good enough to justify buying a second copy for the lady and I to play together.

Patron'd! My very first Patreon!

Oh, hey, it turns out there are in fact several things about the RE timeline that I wasn't aware of because of skipping a couple of games. Article explaining tons of stuff about the story of RE7 for people like me.

Oh, I didn't know that's what Not A Hero was about! On that

We finished it last night! This is easily one of my favorite games I've played in years, and the only AAA game from a big developer that I've loved from start to finish since probably Mass Effect 3 (not counting the Souls games, which I really don't think of as being AAA like other games, but I suppose they are nowadays). I go through periods of thinking I'm basically done with the big budget mainstream games, and then something like this comes along. Per your spoiler about things not being revealed until very late, I'm going to be really curious to do another playthrough and see how many things were foreshadowed well. Like, I'll probably write up some more thoughts on it when I've got more time. My only real complaint echoes one of thepaulhoey, which is that the lack of diversity in enemies was disappointing. The molded by themselves are great enemies, but when they are basically all you fight except for boss fights, it definitely saps the fear out of encountering them.

Leigh, and specifically drunk Leigh's appearance on GB, entered gaming's cultural memory in a large part due to gg incessantly attacking her for months and claiming she was an unstable alcoholic. I have my doubts that anyone would even really remember her appearances all that well if thousands of reminders of those appearances hadn't been floated all over the gaming internet for more than a year. It's the kind of stuff that seeps into you whether you're even highly aware of it or not. So now, all these years later, bringing her up specifically is impossible to separate from the misogynistic hate that was spewed at her directly for the thing you are bringing up. I'm not saying that's why you remember her, but I think at this point it's very difficult to separate "objective" or even personally subjective criticism/observation from the toxic stew that gg cultivated around some people.

jennegatron

A terrific example of this is Deadly Premonition, and I remain surprised that we don't see more games use a small town as their setting. A more or less open world from the start, populated with characters who have jobs, families, free time and follow a day/night cycle. The town as character is one of the things that made that game so phenomenal for me. And "place as character" is something I think a lot of open world games end up failing at. Though maybe that's more of a video game problem in general. Lots of games fail to establish the place as a character. But now I'm waffling on saying that, because plenty do. There's a thought here I want to chase down, but I'm not quite sure what it is.

There's always a something that's the exception to the rule though, that doesn't mean the rule is wrong. I think where a lot of open world games go wrong is that they end up too big, and there's no good reason to take a good look around any one area. Games like Arkham City and at least some of the Souls games are good examples where a word is "open" or at least contiguous and explorable, but it's ultimately a very small area that is densely packed with interesting things to see and do.

I think for me they have to come in moderation, and the design has to feel like it fits the game/world. Once I've played a game in that style, I don't really want to play another one. Like the Arkham games, Batman having some super UI overlay on the city feeding him information makes sense. With Mad Max, I felt it really broke the character of the world, as it should be about exploring the wasteland, learning it, and stumbling across interesting things. Navigating by landmarks in the distance. Stuff like that. But I'm sure that would have been viewed as too risky for a game like Mad Max.

I liked the opening couple of hours of Mad Max, before it became open world. Literally as soon as I hit the spot where I had an Assassin's Creed style map with icons all over it, I quit out and uninstalled. That just felt like anything other than Mad Max to me. There was real potential there, and then they went and made a video game

Oh, yeah, and on performance, I forgot to mention that I bumped up my system RAM from 8GB to 16GB last week, and it had a noticeable impact on performance. I still can't put anything on high, but I was able to bump up more things to medium and maintain the same framerate.

I have to think it is a series that feels a lot different now than when UC1 launched. I mean, still within a year of the PS2/XBOX era, shiny HD graphics were a big, big deal. A ton of people bought HD tvs for the first time during that year because of game consoles.

With any luck, we might finish it tonight depending on when we get started. Our schedules haven't lined up since early last week to play at all. So continuing to scratch the RE itch, I've finished RE Rev 1 and now started into Rev 2. Which is a much different feeling game! The dumb scan for items mechanic is back, but it at least feels less important (a lot of the items you find are gems to cash in for BP) and it feels more organic being able to notice a flash in the environment rather than turn on the green filter in every room. Still, bad idea. Raid Mode in Rev 2 supports local co-op! That's been fun, the lady and I have spent a couple of hours murdering things. The campaign also supports co-op, but it doesn't feel like it's something that's balanced very well on keeping both players engaged. Good on them for including the option, but not a great fit for all players by any means.

I don't disagree with many of your overall conclusions, particularly regarding tone and feel of the game. But I do disagree that the Gimp mask stands out as worth remarking on as being fundamentally out of theme with the original BoI. Original BoI also had the Cat-o-Nine-Tails. While it fits with the theme of abused kid, there are already other things in the game that point towards abuse (Wooden Spoon and Belt). The Cat-o-Nine-Tails stands out for being something from the S&M realm. Both items to me also exist as meta-references of the masochistic nature of getting deep into something like Isaac or SMB. The original also has Speed Ball as an item, and multiple references to abortion. Neither of those fit neatly into the categories you laid out. Though they do fit in with the abusive and fucked up house that Isaac grew up in. Item bloat in Rebirth and its expansions is something that I think has ended up watering down the flavor of the game. But I don't think that's because some items failed to maintain the theme of the original, it's just the sheer number of them.

Regarding the spoiler and shifts in tone/genre:

I may have to install the demo, I wasn't aware that it was a somewhat unique thing? Or at least a bit different. And you can get an item to carry over to the main game if you find it (nothing too special, but every little thing can help sometimes). So apparently there are multiple endings, and multiple extra items you can unlock by doing particular things in a playthrough (pretty typical for REs). I'm pretty jazzed about going back through this, which I almost never am for games. But the REs somehow are the rare exception to that. RE2 is one of the very few games that I ever mastered a speedrun on, being able to run the whole thing in a single sitting with no saves.

So I spent about an hour this evening messing around with graphics settings and reading through some other posts around the web on it (yah PC gaming!). First, there's one setting called Shadow Cache that seems to be crippling to some cards, particularly ones with 4GB or less memory (though some people with up to 8GB cards also reported issues with it). Turning it on for me results in a ton of stuttering and micropauses that seem unrelated to the framerate. In general, shadow and lighting settings seemed to make the biggest difference for me. It's reported to be a VRAM hog, even for beefier cards. I've only got a 3GB card, so I can't really say for sure, but apparently it can max out VRAM even on 6GB cards in some areas.

I'm running an AMD 7950, so your 970 is still a couple of notches above it. And like I said, I had everything on medium/high for the first couple of hours, then going to the Main House just brought the framerate to its knees. This is making me think I should consider a ram and GPU upgrade before Mass Effect comes out.