marginalgloss
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Posts posted by marginalgloss
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48 minutes ago, dartmonkey said:If no microSDXC card is used, everything is stored in internal NAND memory. If a microSDXC card is used, game save data is stored in internal NAND memory while data that can be redownloaded, such as digital games, game updates, and DLC, is stored on the microSDXC card. Nintendo Switch game cards are non-writable; game save data is stored in internal NAND memory.
That certainly sounds like a definitive position on saved games as compared to the 3DS, where stuff can be saved on the cart, on the SD card, or on the internal memory (or even a weird combination of the above). I suspect they've done it to try and remove the possibility of people hacking their saved games by putting the Micro SD into a computer. Of course, this also means you can't backup saves without using the cloud...
I don't really care about the lack of TV/media streaming stuff at launch. Doubtless Netflix et al will roll up if the thing sells, but I'm still waiting for Nintendo to compensate us in Europe for the total absence of the 'TVii' functionality on the Wii U.
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44 minutes ago, Roderick said:I'm also crossing my fingers for that long-fabled unified Nintendo account where all your games are tracked unbound from the machine.
Technically this already exists - eshop purchases are tied to your Nintendo Network ID (NNID) nowadays. If you log in at https://accounts.nintendo.com/ and select 'Account Activity', you should see a complete list of everything you've ever bought on the eshop. You can even buy digital games and trigger downloads remotely on the Nintendo website these days. (Do they provide a consolidated list of all your digital games with links to re-download them? Of course they do not! You have to find each game's page individually on the Nintendo website and click the 'Download' link there!)
The problem with the 3DS and Wii U has always been that if your console gets lost/stolen or fails, there is no way for a user to remotely get their NNID off the old system so they can register it to a new system. It's not impossible - Nintendo customer support has to do it for you - but that usually means a telephone call, which is immensely tedious in the twenty-first century. Also you can't assign your NNID to more than one system - irrespective of whether you want to put your digital games on it - which is madness.
I would imagine that if they could fix this at this stage, they would, but the NNID stuff is probably baked in to the 3DS/Wii U firmware in a way that would make it super difficult. Hopefully they'll fix this with Switch.
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1 hour ago, SuperBiasedMan said:Battery wise there's been speculation that you could use those smartphone battery packs to charge the Switch, since it has that standard USB socket. Is there any battery specs yet, indicating what the literal capacity is?
IIRC they specifically confirmed that you could use an external battery with a USB-C cable during the presentation. They also said that the expected battery life would vary depending on what kind of game you were playing - between three to six hours, I think. For Breath of the Wild they said it'd be more like three hours. Puyo Puyo Tetris might get you a bit further.
Battery life doesn't concern me too much. Like @Twig said, I'm rarely in a position where I won't be able to charge something for that length of time. I'm also rarely in a position where I can play games for more than three hours at once! It's only the 'damn I forgot to plug it in last night' moments that I'd worry about...
On the subject of size, Polygon have a 'Switch Next To Other Things' set of comparison photos; it's pretty good, although I wish they had at least ensured every device was compared to the Switch with the Joy Cons in place. As you can see the screen is about the same size as a Wii U gamepad, though it's a lot sleeker/more compact too. The most illustrative one for me is seeing it alongside the 3DS XL. I think I'd be happy playing something that size in public. I still feel like a bit of a dork carrying around my 3DS / Vita, but I think that's less about size and more because it looks like I'm saying 'luv 2 play my video gaem' rather than 'I am a serious person looking at my iPad'. True fans know we're the coolest.
(I should also note that one of the things that spurred me to buy a 3DS was seeing some guy on the tube playing Fire Emblem Awakening and thinking 'mein gott, that game is beautiful'. And now I'm some guy on the tube, playing Fire Emblem Fates endlessly. The same thing could and probably will happen with the Switch. Nintendo hardware still has a strong and mysterious gravity.)
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On 16/01/2017 at 5:51 AM, SgtWhistlebotom said:MGSV update.
I'm now 55 hours into the game and my enjoyment fell off soon after I posted my last thoughts here. Having played through so many of the other game recently there's a desire to see this one through that's being battered down with how sated I became of all the gameplay elements here. That said, I think it's important for me to recognize that my particular playstyle of being slow and thorough probably contributed to me getting tired of game right as I hit the second map. I'm also not getting any of the highest highs I got in past MGS games; I think this is Kojima's least interesting game of the series design-wise.
I'm at mission 22 or so- if I stopped now would I miss anything great?
Ehhhh...I played this game to death so I'm probably the wrong person to comment on this, but I'll try anyway!
Looking back on it now, I think the best missions are probably in the first half of the game (by which I really mean Afghanistan). 'Hellbound', and the Side Op that precedes it, is probably the pinnacle. There's some great moments in Africa, but there's also some parts where the missions will start to get really frustrating if you don't have some high quality gear unlocked. This is where you can really start to to feel the game's ambitions straining under the weight of expectation. I don't just mean in terms of plot satisfaction - there's at least two missions in Africa where the enemy scripting is so complex that it's easy to make your additional objectives impossible with even the slightest disturbance.
And yet, and yet - there are some great story missions all the way up until the end of 'Chapter 1'. Africa has a bit more filler, but I can't in good conscience recommend skipping it altogether. I would be inclined to just blunder through to the end of Chapter 1 and try not to worry too much about your rankings.
There's some interesting story stuff in Chapter 2 - and one or two moments that really are extraordinary, IMO - but I wouldn't recommend going beyond the ending of Chapter 1 unless you're positively salivating at the thought of unlocking all the gear and replaying the earlier missions with some new (and often very tough) modifiers. Alternatively, I'm sure you can easily catch the best bits of Chapter 2 on YouTube if you're curious.
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I'm slightly bummed that they seem to be abandoning Miiverse with the Switch. I still enjoy posting screenshots and dumb comments there, both on 3DS and Wii U. But I can imagine the costs of running and moderating their own social network have escalated wildly in relation to its actual benefits in terms of revenue. Does Miiverse sell games to people who don't already have them? I would imagine they'd rather channel those resources towards building communities on existing social networks.
Still, even though Miiverse was hopelessly convoluted as a way of saving screenshots, I always appreciated it when games made the effort to directly implement it. Stuff like player comments in Nintendoland, Mario 3D World, etc. I mean, a lot of that was junk content, but in many cases it was a meaningful act of creation by the people who made it. And for some games, like Monster Hunter or Fire Emblem, Miiverse was an excellent way to ask very specific, obscure game questions that might not get an answer anywhere else. (What are we going to do now - go on GameFaqs? Or...*shudders*...reddit?)
And I'll miss StreetPass, too. But I've been thinking about this a bit more, and I actually have no idea what a Switch-based version of the Streetpass suite would look like. We could exchange Miis, sure, but to what end? I really think the 3DS StreetPass games would suddenly start to look lightweight on the new machine, not just because it's more powerful, but because they have to work both at home on the TV and out in the world. I mean, I don't mind picking up my 3D picture tiles while on the bus, but at home on my TV that's suddenly competing with so many other huge experiences. And then there's the tricky question of privacy - you'd have to have separate 'Home' and 'Public' wifi modes for the Switch to hide your profile when you're at home, perhaps...it's an interesting problem, but I'm not sure it's one that Nintendo is especially interested in addressing any more...
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Ahhhh, Nintendo made a little animated movie to explain the parental controls on the Switch. IT'S VERY CUTE.
But this is also a totally unique feature that I've not seen replicated on any other console or closed video game platform: you can use a smartphone app to actively monitor what games your kids are playing and for how long. You can also set time limits, and even tell the Switch to go into standby mode when the time has elapsed. I don't know if it's going to be a major selling point, but it's really quite sophisticated for the big N.
I am so glad my parents didn't have anything like this when I was a kid.
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Oh and my favourite part was the very tall man from EA sullenly intoning that "...my wife and I gave [our son] the name 'Luigi'."
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I got out of bed at 4am to watch the stream in the UK because I'm an idiot. You can find the details in all the usual places but Chris Scullion has a nice concise writeup on his blog, with the new game trailers at the bottom.
Thoughts:
I am amazed at just how much Wiimote-esque motion tracking technology they've managed to squeeze into each Joycon, presumably assisted by the same miniaturisation that enables such things in modern smartphones. They genuinely look like really impressive little things. I am not at all sure they needed to put the tracking stuff in but I guess I'm glad the option is there. (1 2 Switch is a neat concept but feels a bit like a hangover from the Wii era - it's not what they need right now.)
The $300/£280 RRP is about what I expected. But I worry that it's going to have trouble competing with the Xbox One S and PS4 Slim; there are some ferociously competitive bundles out there. Serious differentiation is going to be essential - if you missed out on the Wii U and games like Mario Kart 8 and Splatoon, it starts to look a lot more desirable. (I have seen small children lose total control at the sight of Mario Kart 8.)
I'm a little more disappointed with the decision to charge for online play. No way I would have predicted that: free multiplayer is a distinguishing feature of Wii U / 3DS, but perhaps they just decided it was no longer sustainable. There's talk of giving away stuff, like a free SNES game a month (with online multiplayer?) but I'm not sure that would be enough for me. They don't yet have the reputation for quality online stuff, or the lineup of top-tier multiplayer titles to justify it. (Also - are there that many SNES games where you'd want online multiplayer?)
Mario Odyssey looks amazing and bewildering. I saw nothing at all in there that looked like the classic Mushroom Kingdom, which is perhaps stranger than those deeply uncanny human figures wandering around, uh, 'New Donk City'. It makes me wonder if there's a planned 'Mario in the big city!!' movie or theme park crossover coming.
They said nothing at all about Virtual Console, which is a bit concerning.
Zelda also looks amazing. It was a little odd that they didn't localise the new trailer. Are we going to be playing it in Japanese and waiting for a language patch? I mean, I'd probably be fine with that. But I am probably also going to wait for the reviews, and wait to see how it performs on the Wii U. As long as that version is technically sound, that's likely the version I'll be playing. The launch presentation was fun and interesting to watch but I would need a few more very special things in March before I'd be tempted into a Day One Perch.
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I too had a quick go on this after seeing it mentioned on Chris' twitter feed. It's a neat little conceptual thing - a bit like one of those infinitely recursive Borges stories made real in video game terms.
There isn't very much to it. I don't only mean that it's very short: it is a bit lacking in thematic content, or mechanical interest. But for a free game, it was wonderfully unsettling for a few minutes, so I'd say it's worth it for that alone.
Also I liked the music a lot.
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Very much agree with all @Patrick R said about tone. It's a personal preference but I think qualities like 'tone' and 'atmosphere' (the mise-en-scene?) might be more important for me than 'characters' for movies in general. Not that anyone has to choose one or the other, of course...
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I think the 'other' new British television show about video games mentioned is Go 8 Bit. It's a panel show where celebrities/comedians compete (usually very badly) in game challenges and exchange witty banter. It is...not that good? I'm not a fan of the format, so I found a lot of it quite cringeworthy. But there's things to like about it: Dara O'Briain, the host, has a genuine love of the subject, and (noted games journo) Ellie Gibson does some excellent and highly concise summaries of video game history. Also it's not often you get to see Bob Mortimer blundering through Resident Evil 3 on national television.
Anyway, I really enjoyed the discussion of the original Diablo vs Diablo 2 vs Diablo 3 in this episode. I played a lot of the first two games in the series in my younger and more vulnerable years, and I've lately been enjoying Diablo 3, mostly played via local coop on PS4 with my partner. I've enjoyed all the games, but at the moment it's nice to have a cooperative experience which is engaging without being especially challenging (in the way that most cooperative games are, tbh). Honestly, Diablo 3 feels genuinely playful - like in the most primitive, child-like sense of picking up things and smashing them into hordes of beautiful looking other things - more playful than the first two games ever felt to me.
I think the point about the tactical importance of line-of-sight in Diablo is great. I remember thinking that was super interesting - and remarkably fresh - in the original game. And that, as well as other mechanics like consumable potions, weapons degradation, was basically rendered irrelevant in Diablo 3 which - as Chris suggested - feels much more like a Gauntlet-esque romp than a roguelike where survival is paramount.
But I wonder if one reason those mechanics were phased out was because they didn't really hold up well over time. The perspective thing presents an interesting problem to new players - there might be hordes of high-level enemies behind this door, should I find a way round or use it as a bottleneck? - but that's essentially the same problem at level 1 as it is at level 20. You pick a class-specific skill set to deal with that problem and you stick with it, because (unlike Diablo 3) there's no way to change that build on the fly. Or take the example of Nick wondering whether he should press on through the dungeon or return to town to restock despite the dangers - that might be interesting the first time, but is it still interesting 20 or 30 hours down the line, when resource scarcity isn't such an issue? By a certain point in the game, having the money to buy new potions and scrolls isn't a problem anymore. The issue then becomes juggling inventory space; and for all the nostalgia we might have about fitting stuff into the Resi 4 style 'briefcase' inventory, I'm not sure it's a thing which becomes any more fulfilling to play with the further you get into that game. -
11 hours ago, eot said:Operation Flashpoint is definitely an acquired taste, but I think it's brilliant. Much of what made DayZ great can be traced directly back to OpFl. I'm not sure if you know but there's a feature to speed up time, just like in flight sims, so those dull sections can be over quite fast. It is a game where you fail a lot though.
This takes me back - I played so much Operation Flashpoint back in the day. I've still got the boxed 'Gold Edition' somewhere that came with all the discs of extra content. I never want to get rid of it!
It was hard as nails, and IIRC there was no proper manual saving system - I think it used checkpoints or something, which meant you could lose huge chunks of progress if you weren't careful – but for some reason that didn’t put me off. You just had to be unbelievably careful. My main memory is of inching through bushes, waiting for some suspicious cluster of three dark pixels against a hillside to move enough to risk a shot. But perhaps there are trainers available now to mitigate the whole ‘die from one unseen bullet from a mile away’ thing.
Some of the mission design in that game was astonishingly ambitious for its time. It walked a fine line between ‘serious military simulator’ and ‘machine for creating emergent open world nonsense’ along the lines of Far Cry 2/MGSV. I'm thinking of stuff like:The one where you’re ordered to keep watch over a tiny campsite by the ocean. You’re totally alone, it’s at night, and of course there are Russian commandos trying to sneak up on you in the dark. No threat indicators, no red dots on a mini-map – just a campfire, a rifle, and the vague portent of your impending death.
The one where you get lost behind enemy lines without a weapon, a map, or a compass. You have only a note which tells you to ‘Go west’ to get back to the friendly side – but how to figure out which way is west? You have to look at the stars! (They mapped the night sky in realistic detail for this game. Again, there’s nothing in the game that tells you this is what to do – it’s an open world, so you can go any way you want.)
The one after that where you get captured by the Russians and have to escape their base before they march you to a firing squad. You could book it over the fence, sneak out, or just steal a tank and drive down the road screaming bloody murder. You could even steal a Hind D (“…a Hind D…?!”) and strafe the place with rockets, if you were really quick.
The ‘Resistance’ add on campaign, which took the emergent stuff to a ridiculous degree. The first mission had you as an ex-soldier settling down for a quiet life in the countryside. A couple of Russians pull up one day – this is all in-engine, in-game stuff, no cutscenes – and ask you if you’ll collaborate with them. You can choose to help them (in which case the game basically ends) or you can run into your shed, get your old rifle, and take them out. But then you have to steal their jeep and head for the horizon before backup arrives.
The Resistance stuff also had a unique risk/reward mechanic whereby in order to equip your squad of freedom fighters for future missions, you had to take guns and ammo and vehicles from the Russians by literally picking stuff up from the bodies of fallen soldiers. This lead to some interesting moments where you knew there were a bunch of tanks about to rumble over the nearest hill but you had to desperately salvage ammo from a raid – it was really clever and tense. Unfortunately, micromanaging the squad AI was also a pain in the butt, and all this only added to the already considerable difficulty of the game. But for its time it seemed unbelievably sophisticated.
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I fell into a timesink browsing the 2007 in video gaming list on Wikipedia, which as usual is a veritable goldmine of amazing trash - Jackass: The Game on PS2, anyone? And who knew there was a PS2 game based on The Shield? Or, uh...Beowulf?
It's interesting to see so many TV/movie adaptations, and the amount of casual games making it to the DS and PSP - the first iPhone came out that year too, so presumably this was the last hurrah a certain kind of mobile gaming...
There is some stuff worth seeking out. Penumbra: Overture is interesting, if you can tolerate horror games, and the idea of hitting angry dogs with household tools doesn't put you off. (The 'combat' is extremely bad, but you can savescum your way through it without too much trouble; it's otherwise a highly atmospheric first effort from the guys who would go on to make Amnesia: The Dark Descent and Soma.)
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7 hours ago, baekgom84 said:Did you watch the theatrical cut of Alien 3 or the director's cut? I've heard that the director's cut, while not a great movie, is a big improvement. From what I know of Alien 3, it went through a tortured pre-production that basically set it up for failure. I don't see a path to success when you immediately kill off two popular characters from the previous movie, and then ask us to care about a group of pretty unlikeable prisoners. Also, it just seemed like lazy writing to say, 'oh yeah there were two facehuggers hiding on the ship that they didn't notice'. Like, they fought a fucking alien queen on the ship before they went into cryosleep, you'd think they would have swept every inch of it to make sure there was nothing else hiding in there.
Actually I have no idea what version it was - I watched it on broadcast TV, like an old person - but from looking this up now I think it was the theatrical cut. (I had no idea there were quite so many changes made in the other editions; why does the alien come out of an ox rather than a dog?!) Apparently David Fincher has effectively disowned the movie so it looks like the idea of version control has finally gone out the window with this one.
The death of the crew from Aliens at the start of Alien 3 didn't really bother me - perhaps that's just because I knew it was going to happen already (I'd spoiled myself for most of the key plot points). But I think it's also that Aliens never meant that much to me. I think it's the first sign of the film trying to put clear blue water between itself and the James Cameron version - like, this is a dark 90s horror film rather than an optimistic 80s action movie, and all your favourite characters are gonna die, and everything is just going to be fairly hopeless. And I like that, as an ambition. I like that pre-millennial, anti-corporate angst of it. It's trying to bring it back to the true existential Conradian vision: a world populated by small-minded jobsworths who are just trying to cover their own backs, while their environment becomes the thing that will ultimately devour them.
But of course none of it is carried off very well. Maybe the best thing would be for us all to imagine the version of Alien 3 that we'd like to see in our heads, and forgo any hope that it'll ever be fixed...
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To me the new trailer has the look of something calculated to appeal to a very general audience, who perhaps need reminding about what the whole franchise is about. It’s odd that they wouldn’t lead with an online-only teaser aimed at devotees of the original, especially with Scott back at the helm, but I think we’ll get something a bit more mysterious in due course.
(Do kids know or care about the Alien movies today, I wonder? Is it still a known quantity for anyone under 20? It feels like a long time since anything official happened in that department. There's Alien: Isolation, but that was a fairly niche thing which felt like it happened in spite of the trademark holders, not because of them. I guess Prometheus was relatively recent, but if you weren’t a fan of the originals you could easily miss the connections.)
My expectations for the movie are fairly low. I don’t think Prometheus was a great movie, but I’ve always found a lot to like about it. I don’t know how to explain – it has a certain rich, strange atmosphere. It has some fine imagery. I hope for some of that at least. But given everything that Ridley Scott has done since Alien, I sometimes wonder if he really understands what made the original film so compelling. You could say the same for Blade Runner, especially given his bizarre recent attempts to skewer some of its ambiguities...
I actually watched Alien 3 for the first time ever recently. Having heard forever that this was the worst in the series, I was surprised to find myself enjoying it a great deal. I think I might even like it better than Aliens – I mean, I don’t think it’s a 'better movie', but I like Alien 3 better. It’s kind of a mess; but what a weird, interesting mess! And if the Creative Assembly decided to make a follow up to Alien: Isolation and based it on the idea of ‘Doing Alien 3 Properly, With Monks In Space On A Wooden Spaceship’, I'd be very happy with that.
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I saw this a few days ago and was left with a very strong feeling of ‘well that was fine’ – maybe tempered more with disappointment than elation. For me at least the sense of a missed opportunity was strong with this one.
I agree with a lot of what others have said in this thread about the weakness of the first and second acts; the third act felt to me like the film they really wanted to make all along. But it took so long to get there! By the time the actual raid began, my brain was still ringing with questions that probably didn’t need to be answered in the first place.
It lacks any of the really penetrating imagery that made The Force Awakens so memorable. There’s nothing as meaningful in Rogue One as the sight of the crashed Star Destroyer at the start of TFA; nothing even as good as the (much gif’d) little nod exchanged between Finn and Poe before they fly off on their separate missions*. The Rogue One cast all deliver solid performances all round, but it felt workmanlike by comparison; perhaps there just wasn’t room for anyone to really shine. Donnie Yen and Riz Ahmed were great, but it felt like their roles were salami-sliced to make space for the Mads Mikkelsen stuff, which arguably didn’t need to be there at all.
I found myself craving something like the classical unities of drama: one location (a big city or something), and one action (grab deff star planz) taking place over one fixed period of time. Add a group of rad characters; have incredible, ridiculous things happening constantly. Zero downtime. Forget the whole question of motivation; or at least park it somewhere we don’t have to think about it. Give me a Dredd or a Die Hard in the Star Wars universe and I would have been so happy.
…and yet my partner, who I thought was going to hate it, enjoyed it almost without reservation! So perhaps my own reaction has something to do with my own expectations; she knew next to nothing about it, and was totally absorbed.
*- although I did enjoy how very small Felicity Jones looked while in disguise; I cannot believe nobody stopped her and said 'aren't you a little short for a stormtrooper' at that point, though naturally this would have been both very good and very bad.
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I sort of wish they had done something more with the Frenzy system. Something a bit different. In mechanical terms, it's not much different to Bleed in the other Souls games; I mean, it does become more of a problem later on in a way that Bleed rarely was - but I sort of wish it took a different form, beyond 'bar fills up and then you take a huge amount of damage when it pops'. That and the insight system were the things I wish were fleshed out a bit more (as it were).
Unrelatedly, one thing I'd really like to know and can't seem to find info on anywhere: does having a PS4 Pro affect performance at all in this game? It seems unlikely that From Software will put out an official patch, but I'd still be curious to know if anyone has noticed a more stable framerate on the latest machine. Though I would guess the number of people who've played this game enough to notice on both consoles is probably very small!
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Regarding taking out the clockwork soldiers, there's plenty of options:
- The easiest way by far is to use a stun mine - as long as it's upgraded to give two shocks per enemy, a single mine will destroy them completely. This doesn't count as a kill, IIRC.
- Grenades are not especially effective. It just makes them really mad.
- The falling assassination move will knock off their heads the first time. Once they're headless, they can't see anything, so you can move around in front of them all you like while crouched. But if they hear any noise, they'll track it down. (Amusingly, they are also rendered unable to distinguish between you and your enemies - and their deaths will count against a clean hands run, of course. Not that I cared: I had them kill Jindosh, which felt appropriate somehow.)
- If you do a falling assassination on a headless clockwork, it should destroy them entirely.
- Once you've got upgraded (hardened) crossbow bolts, you can shoot their heads off silently from a distance. This is very effective, and quiet, but it can be tricky to get right. I don't know if the damage drops off with range or if it's the hit detection but I've had it fail a few times.
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Eventually you can get upgrades for the pistol and sword that will allow you to take them down as if they were human enemies. But this feels a bit like cheating tbh.
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I’m glad you chose this one and I’m interested to see how the discussion pans out. Wuthering Heights is one of those books I’ve attempted to finish several times over the years, with little success. I’ve tried quite hard with it, because as a gothic romance, it seems like it should be exactly the kind of thing I find appealing, and it does have some indisputably great moments...
...but I still find it a very difficult book to actually read. I mean difficult in the way that people talk about Ulysses or Gravity's Rainbow as difficult - not bad, just hard. It’s nothing to do with the period quality of the prose: I love Jane Eyre and Villette dearly, for example, and I quite like The Tenant of Wildfell Hall too. But there’s something very different about Emily Bronte’s prose; reading it feels like scrambling and splashing slowly across a sodden moorland (if that isn’t too much of a Bronte cliché). You're forever crossing some bleak expanse, which is occasionally spectacular, in search of something which might or might not be there. There’s a perpetual awkwardness about it, perhaps, in comparison to Charlotte Bronte’s much more assured style.
I'd be curious to know if anyone else feels the same or if it's just me? (I'm entirely willing to believe it's just me! I hope this doesn't put anyone off the book!)
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My partner and I have been avidly watching Terrace House, which is a long-running Japanese reality TV show that Netflix are showing worldwide for a couple of seasons. The format is basically The Real World - six young people living in a shared house, filmed constantly, but without any competitive element or other restrictions on their lives.
I never normally watch reality TV, but this is really enjoyable. Partly this might be down to my fascination with the cultural difference between British/American shows and the Japanese equivalent. It's not exactly relaxed, but the whole thing feels really good-natured - there's never any sign that it's about to descend into a drunken screaming match, like on The Real Housewives or Big Brother. You don't get the sense that the producers are trying to catch people at their worst. Everyone is remarkably reserved and diplomatic, even when it comes to the most intense emotional expression. Every little detail is rich with significance. And there's no talking to the camera in first person, which lends it a very natural feel; of course I have no idea about the extent to which it's truly 'unscripted', but it's good fun regardless.
Also the food always looks incredible.
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Great podcast! I think at some point somebody wondered out loud what a 'Miyamoto version' of Super Hypercube would look like, which reminded me that there already is one - sort of?
The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword has a series of puzzles where you have to fit a big, blocky, oddly-shaped key into a big, blocky, oddly-shaped lock. In order to do it you have to hold the Wiimote horizontally in front of you and rotate it all the way around in different directions to find the right angle of entry. It's quite similar to Super Hypercube, I think - but for the lock flying at your face, the neon lasers, etc...
It's an interesting comparison which I never seem to hear mentioned, even though I think the original Hypercube used Wii controllers (for head tracking I think?). But then if we get into 'Zelda did it first!!' in game mechanics we would probably be here a while.
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I finished a little game called The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time on the 3DS. It's pretty obscure, you probably haven't heard of it? It's super good though
Until the Wii U/3DS generation I hadn't played any Zelda games at all, so it's been a great pleasure to discover them for the first time. Over the last couple of years I've since played Link to the Past, Wind Waker HD, (about half of) Skyward Sword, (most of) Link's Awakening, and Link Between Worlds. Those are all basically very good too!
For me, Ocarina has probably been the most consistently enjoyable one so far. (Though I think I like Wind Waker more, for all its problems.) We all know that Ocarina represented a huge step forwards in terms of showing the possibilities of 3D graphics in gaming. Yet it also picks up the baton where Super Metroid left off in terms of Nintendo trying to make something with mature themes. And I don't just mean in the sense of depicting death and tragedy and decay: I think it's trying to say some fairly profound things about video games as a way for adults to connect with earlier/later versions of themselves. I might write something about that.Some of the darker levels later in the game also reminded me of just how much the Dark Souls games owe to Zelda. I mean, once you get into fighting those big knights with axes near the end - and even the final battle with Ganon, where you can roll between his legs to wail on his tail - that's the Souls combat in a nutshell. But more fundamentally, Zelda is the source of that same unwillingness to explain its essential mechanics. Ocarina makes some of that stuff a little less obscure with hints - but often it's not that much clearer what you need to do next, especially compared with modern games. And of course there's tons of stuff to discover which is wildly, delightfully unintuitive.
I think now I also understand why some Zelda fans get tetchy about the future direction of the series, and changes made to 'the formula' thus far. While playing Ocarina, I kept thinking about the promise of Breath of the Wild and wondering: how much more game does anybody really need? Aren't I having enough fun doing this amazing dungeon already? As it stands, the game strikes a fantastic balance between 'helpful optional stuff to do' and 'stuff that must be done to beat the game' - would it really be that much more meaningful to add five or six more things like the Biggeron's Sword quest just to unlock more non-essential upgrades?But I hope those fears are unfounded. So far it seems like Breath of the Wild will be a totally new thing, both for Zelda and Nintendo. I remain cautiously optimistic.
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I sometimes wish Digital Foundry would just stick up all their data about clock speeds and processor sizing and memory bandwidth in the form of a spreadsheet and leave it to those inclined to pore over. Their articles are extremely readable, especially when they're about comparing different versions of games already released; but in a case like this, the writing is so loaded with hesitant qualifiers and 'known-unknowns' and ambiguities about hardware potential that in the end I felt none the wiser for reading it.
Here's the only part that really worries me:
Quotethe table below does indeed confirm that developers can choose to hobble Switch performance when plugged into match the handheld profile should they so choose.
I can see developers who don't have the resources to fully optimise and QA two different versions of the same game thinking 'we'll just scale everything down to what's possible for the portable version, and I guess it'll work fine when docked'. Which would perhaps not be a big deal for, say, Steamworld Heist - but yeah, as the article suggests, it might be optimistic to think we're going to see the latest AssCreeds or whatever on this device.
But I'm sure it's going to be fine! If it sells gangbusters, devs will make time to get their games on the platform in a way that appeals. Probably.
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So I've been playing this for at least 15 hours now; I've finished mission 3, and I'm on the approach to mission 4. I'm taking the same approach as I did with my first playthrough of the first game: a stealthy but extremely destructive high chaos run. Basically I want to see as much of the world as I can, and the safest way to do that is to ensure that there's nobody else left alive to spoil my party.
It's great, of course. This Glixel interview with Harvey Smith is extremely illuminating, if you haven't seen it already. Though I do wonder if we have to believe him when he says things like the 'canon' way to play the game is with the Emily/Low Chaos route. I've always felt like the distinguishing feature of Dishonored is - to borrow the phrase from another game - the sense of cleansing these foul streets. It's an awful world and you're an unhappy, unpleasant person, and you're going to tear it apart. The tone of the game is a brutal fantasy of power and revenge, isn't it? Or maybe that's just me projecting...
Still, for all the work they've done to add new and fun non-lethal options to the game, it feels like there are very few solid mechanical differences between putting enemies to sleep and killing them. This isn't like MGS V, where each option had its pros and cons (sleeping enemies would get back up, surrendered enemies wouldn't except if there was an alarm, dead enemies couldn't be kidnapped). Knock someone out here and they might as well be put down forever. The one neat thing they have done, as Harvey explains in the interview, is create a dynamic morality system which secretly labels every NPC as nice or nasty - that's what the Heart draws from when you use it on somebody. So you could theoretically play through the game only killing 'bad' people, and you'd get the low chaos outcome - but would that be the 'best' approach?
Of course I'm certainly going to do a non-lethal playthrough to explore the low chaos world, because the world design is still glorious. The environmental detail in the interiors, and the way everything feels like it fits naturally together - it's just exquisite.
The plot is...odd. I don't dislike it, but it feels rather insubstantial compared to the original. It feels like they had a bunch of great ideas for characters, and some great ideas for mission set pieces, and they knew Emily and Corvo would both be in it - and they then had to cram in all the on-rails story sequences at the last moment. It doesn't all quite hang together for me.
Spoilers for stuff that was semi-hidden in the first game, and is right there in the beginning of this game:
I'm kind of astonished that Dishonored 2 so firmly establishes in the opening sequences that Corvo is Emily's father, and that the Heart is actually the incarnation of Emily's mother in some kind of metaphysical form. Both of those points were two of my favourite pieces of deliberately ambiguous lore for the first game - the moment where you, as Corvo, come upon young Emily's crayon picture of you with 'DADDY' written under it is one of my favourite moments of 'omg' environment storytelling ever. And the fact that Corvo himself can't remark on it is beautiful.
But now we've got to be told everything, I guess. It's disappointing. In a way, I would rather they had left that stuff uncertain. We could have had Emily ruling alone and uncertain, and Corvo living somewhere in quiet retirement - surely a man of dubious reputation after the events of the first game - only picking up his mask again for one last job. And you could plant hints throughout the game, perhaps, of what their relationship is/was. I miss that sense of mystery.
Oh, and the sequences where Jessamine reappears to Emily as a ghost are bad. I wish they hadn't done that. She's right there in the Heart! We don't need to see her like that!
anyone else excited about Resident Evil 7?
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I'm...sort of excited I guess? I'm certainly very curious to read all the reviews. Given that I loved Alien Isolation, I would guess it's exactly the kind of thing I'll really enjoy once I get around to it, but I'm in no hurry.
It looks like a beautifully crafted game, but I look at screenshots and gameplay videos and demo footage released so far and there's not much about it that says to me 'come and explore this rich and interesting and varied world'. It's just very bleak, and not in a compelling way? But as I've not played it, I'm entirely willing to believe I'm wrong about this.
It's all a bit 'last episode of True Detective season 1', if you catch my drift.