Saltimbanco

I haven't played anything that made me go "Wow, that's a GOTY contender right there!", but Celeste was very good, and I'm quite enjoying Vampyr right now.

@HenkeYeah, I saw that video, then I read the written companion piece. It's where I found out that the wallrunning is automatic. So while he says it's better, from his report it's also more automatic and the thing he praises it for the most was already on SM2. If it does turn out better, great, but I was really counting on it to be as manual as possible.

I managed to find some stuff and my suspicions have been confirmed. The game doesn't have a charge jump or ( as far as I know) a button to get extra momentum mid-swing, and wall running is automatic. It does have your webs actually attach to buildings, and you control when you release the web, which seems to be what people are raving about, but that wasn't exclusive to Spider-Man 2. Other games had it and were still not very good. It's about how it all comes together. It doesn't mean this game will be bad, nor necessarily worse than Spider-Man 2, but it does mean that the claims that it's returning to its roots are sadly exaggerated. I thought those mechanics were a bit too complicated for us to ever see them again in a mainstream game meant to have broad appeal like that and hoped this game would prove me wrong. That might still happen, I won't know for sure until I have it in my hands, but I'm doubting it.

Are there any gameplay impressions of the Spider-Man game out there from people who played Spider-Man 2? People say the webslinging is manual, but it doesn't look all that manual. Not like Spider-Man 2. I want to hear from someone who has that frame of reference.

Since I'm being a party pooper, might as well give my opinion on the samurai games of the show: Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice - Looks amazing. I've been a fan of the Souls series since Demon's Souls, but if I'm to be perfectly honest, I like Bloodborne, and even Nioh, way better. I like the faster, more twitchy combat. Sekiro doesn't appear to be as fast, but it seems to have a way bigger emphasis on parrying. I only got halfway okay at that in Nioh. Looking forward to learning the ropes here Also really digging the Hookshot and how it will affect exploration. As well as how stealth seems to finally be more viable with this one. Finally, I think Miyazaki is at his best when he's crafting a world from the ground up, so I'm glad he's doing it again with a new IP. Nioh 2 - This tells me absolutely nothing. It's really just a "Heads up! This game is in production, okay?". Still, I'm happy that it is. I loved the first one. I just don't like it too much when games get announced too soon and then we have to wait several years until we can finally play it. Ghost of Tsushima - Looks okay. I've loved Sly Cooper and the first two Infamous games. Here though... Frankly, it might just be that I'm sick of "cinematic" games, or open-world "jacks of all trades, masters of none" games, but I'm not sold on the gameplay. I'd need to see more of it, but without further information, it looks a bit too simple for my taste.

Can someone explain to me why there's people jizzing their pants over Assassin's Creed Odyssey? How is it not going to be the exact same thing we've had before? That's what they always do. The same game, with maybe one new feature that varies from "changes very little" to "changes nothing".

Let me preface this by saying I have not played the recently released God of War soft reboot. I am speaking based on my impressions of the demo released during the game's announcement, my assumptions might very well be wrong about the final release of the game and, if that is the case, I do hope someone corrects me. I'm going to have a bit of an incoherent rant on the game, and the industry, and the difficulty in finding reviews that are useful for us personally. TL;DR The game always looked bad to me. People are going crazy for it. I wanna have fun too, but am reticent on buying the game, and haven't found any review or argument online that swayed me in one direction on another. Please, do share your thoughts on the game, or expectations for it, if you haven't played it yet; and where you're coming from with your opinions. It would be very useful for me to read it. In order to explain where I'm coming from, I must first say that when this new God of War was announced, all I saw was red flags. The sort of flags that make me say "This is emblematic of what's wrong with AAA game development". A contrarian statement, to be sure, considering how well received that first trailer and demo were, but you'll see how truly contrarian it is when I start describing some of those red flags. Let me recognize that the series needed to be shaken up. I had no interest in playing God of War Ascension and likely wouldn't have played a God of War 5 that did the same thing all over again. I welcome a new direction but was unimpressed with the one they chose. Mainly. the red flags I saw was with respect to the game being more "cinematic". What a word I despise in the context of video games. At first glance, it seemed to have more in common with The Last of Us than older GoW games. That was a red flag for me both in that it made this brand new direction for the series seem less like a bold move, and more like following industry trends by making an older series with name recognition fit into a pre-existing mold. And it was a red flag because I do not care for The Last of Us. Something I often feel alone in saying. TLoU felt to me like an unimpressive Third-Person Shooter glued to an above average CG movie. The mechanics just don't feel tied well enough to story in my eyes, and it does put me off seeing these types of games being held up by some as proof of the artistry in the medium (a tacky thing to do, and even more tacky is me having a bone to pick with them, I know), instead of games that do tell their stories entirely through their gameplay. I know, not every game can be something like Papers, Please, where the playing the game just is the story, but it just bugs me a bit. And let me tell you, that interview where the voice actor said that the script is "not a game script, it's a script", had me. I know some games do try to bridge the gap by telling their stories not during cutscenes but during gameplay. Unfortunately, often times that ends with long treks where nothing happens except you walk down a path while two characters talk (or, God forbid, it's a forced walking section!), which are just as lacking in gameplay as cutscenes, without the benefit of being able to skip it if you've already seen it, which absolutely kills my interest in replaying games. That's what I saw from the demo. Walk, walk, watch, walk, walk, highly scripted combat sequence. The second big red flag is in regards to the camera and the combat system. Unlike previous games in the series, the camera isn't fixed far away from the player, giving you a full view of the action, it's third-person and over-the-shoulder. A person who chooses to see the best in all situations would probably say that this is in order to strengthen the story. The camera puts you right there with Kratos so you can more easily relate to him, and that's necessary with the more emotional story they're trying to tell. A cynical person would say it has a camera like that because games like Uncharted and TLoU do and they are just copying those. I, perhaps even more cynical, would say it's a measure to squeeze better graphics of out of the weak PS4, even if they have to sacrifice gameplay for it. The PS4 isn't that strong, narrowing the field-of-view is a cheap way to limit the number of things it has to render at once, and that's the only way they could get a consistent framerate out of it. They could lower the graphics and zoom-out the camera, but shiny graphics is good for marketing and it sells, so they narrowed it. It's not so different from The Order: 1886 adding black bars in the top and bottom of the screen and excusing it as making the game more "cinematic". I think about what that does to the gameplay. If the fights won't be smaller as a result, if they're not how the game will deal with large groups and enemies that aren't within your cone of vision. If the narrow field of view won't necessitate you fiddle with the camera more, how you'll have to choose between using your thumb to move the camera or hitting enemies with the face buttons. If whether in order to remedy this they'll put your attacks in the shoulder buttons like the Souls games, except that it's fine in those because they aren't fast-paced, combo-heavy games, how will GoW deal with this? Is the game slower? It looks slower. I see the director commenting about the lack of a jump button, which would add a whole new dimension to the combat, as, and I'm paraphrasing it here, "fun but it wouldn't fit the story". I'm half reminded of a combat preview I saw for Kingdom Come: Deliverance, where they kept repeating something along the lines of "Would it be useful if the game let you do X thing? Yes, but it wouldn't be very realistic now, would it?". Here I see a game that is so caught up in the story it wants to tell and being taken seriously, that the gameplay seems to be much further down in its list of considerations. Willingly throwing it under the bus if they have to. These are all the impressions I took from the promotional material I've seen for the game, whatever I glimpsed from the gameplay, and a couple of reviews. I know, I'm basically passing judgment on the game without having played it, and I've seen people use that to shield a game from criticism many times before and, it's true, opinions aren't all created equal, and a misinformed one is certainly worth much less. However, while I like to speak from a place of knowledge regarding any game, no one is going to pay full price for a game they're afraid they won't like, just to confirm it is indeed bad. So judgments will invariably be passed. Now, what the issue with that? If there is so much information on the game out there, how can I be so uncertain of the game? Why can't I look it up and know if it's good or bad? And why do I care? Now we move on to the second part of this barely structured rant: I don't want to instantly invalidate the popular opinion. Say it's bad because it's popular, and only filthy casuals must like it. The game is undoubtedly very popular. Objectively, it must offer a large number of people something they enjoy very much. If that's the case, I'm left wondering if it could offer me something as well. I'm by nature a very critical person. I think it's an enjoyment I take from taking things apart that leads me to think about their flaws. But I don't think I'm necessarily negative. I recognize that liking something is always more enjoyable than not liking it, and I would certainly enjoy much more playing a game for 30h that surprises me with how good it is, than playing a game I hate for 30h for the smug self-satisfied feeling that my initial judgment was correct. The issue I've found with truly gauging how good or bad it is is one that I'm certain everyone here has felt: a disconnect between your own unique tastes and that of the general audience, coupled with a lack of familiarity of the people behind the opinions being professed and where they're coming from. I've watched some streams and was unimpressed by the gameplay, but I didn't watch it much out of a fear of spoilers (the game does sell itself on story and spectacle after all), so who's to say if what I saw is truly representative? A review, on the other hand, is certainly meant to be representative of the whole thing, but how can you trust the person's opinion will be applicable to your own experience? I swear, I'm usually not this paranoid with reviews. But my opinion has differed wildly when it comes both to hack n' slash games, and this style of "cinematic" game. I even saw one review that said the game's combat is the best he ever played, while saying that in DMC and Bayonetta you can button mash your way to victory, which I'd argue is just untrue outside of the easiest settings, normal setting maybe. There's the aforementioned TLoU. There's DmC: Devil May Cry which got such great reviews, and I found it merely mediocre, although in that case it was usually prefaced with "I never played/got into the previous games", so I did have a baseline for reference. I understand that most websites try to be everything to everyone. They cater mainly to the more casual consumer, and that's okay, but it's in times like these that I miss truly knowing the reviewer's tastes, and whether or not it lines up with mine. There are certain individual critics on Youtube that I do follow, but they are more the type to wait a month to a year to do a deep dive into a game, rather than a consumer's guide style review of a brand new game. The general audience's opinion is also something I have difficulty following. It's bound to be shallower ("This is the game of the generation!"), and the vociferous uncritical praise I see for it gives me such flashbacks to Horizon: Zero Dawn last year. Which got similarly high scores, and so many people ready to call it the GOTY before it even came, which when I played I found it to be a better version of the Ubisoft Game™, entertaining, but nothing special. I must admit though, this feels much worse when the conversation is centered around a game exclusive to any given console. I'm left still unsure of the game. The combat is my big question. I don't like what I've seen of it. So many of the conversations surrounding the game though appear to focus solely on the story. Is the gameplay the afterthought I took it to be? Or is it the sort of thing that's easy to get into but there's more there for you to sink your teeth into if you want to? I can't lie and say I haven't seen praise for it's "deep, nuanced combat", but I have no idea what criteria the person is employing, what they consider to be "deep and nuanced". It looks like a simpler version of the older titles, which were already a fairly simple version of a hack n' slash as it is. This nearly endless rambling, might not serve much of a purpose and thank you to those who reached the end. I just wanted to rant. The game looks bad. But people love it. Part of me really wants to play it, find out it's completely engaging when you actually have it in your hands and fall in love with it despite everything. Part of me is convinced it will never happen, and I'll just boringly walk, watch and occasionally square, square, triangle my way through it. Nothing I read seems to tip me over to either side. Rarely addressing my misgivings with it. I do hope you guys take this opportunity to talk about the game. Good or bad. Answering my questions, or just taking this opportunity to talk about any element of it you felt like sharing. Just knowing it's not a one-way street will make this thread far more informative to me than anything else I might have read on it. If you have your own experience trying to find criticism that applied to you, do share it. If there is anyone whose opinion you trust to steer you in the right direction and in what context. Or maybe you have your own story of playing a game and later wondering why the hell didn't anyone warn you about a certain thing, or perhaps you have your pet peeve that no one talks about in reviews but is really important to you, do tell.

I actually went ahead and got the game to try it out. I'm about to leave the lake area after doing a couple of side missions. My impressions so far have been as follows: - Story is fine. Hasn't made an impact on me either way so far. - Camera is absolutely atrocious. Like, really, it's awful. The game wants to be a 3rd Person Shooter so bad that Kratos doesn't attack where he is facing, he attacks where the camera is facing, so you have to constantly maneuver the camera around to hit enemies in melee combat of all things. Since the FOV is so tiny you can only see a fraction of the arena and have to constantly be adjusting the camera when you're surrounded, which is always, because every encounter is basically the same so far: 4 or 5 melee guys spawn around you, plus a couple of ranged ones in the back. The game tries to remedy the fact that the camera is clearly not up to the task by having little arrows in the bottom of the screen pointing to offscreen enemies, but they blend into each other and some of the colors are deceptively similar at a glance, it's not a substitute for a proper camera. I think about 90% of the deaths I've suffered were the result of attacks from offscreen and likely wouldn't have happened if it had the same camera system as the older games. - Combat is fine? I guess? Too early to tell. It was definitely very boring at the beginning of the game when I felt like there was little I could do beyond repeating the same button combinations forever. I've since unlocked some other moves and finally feel like I have some choices in battle. We'll see what it builds up to. So far the best part about it is its visceral nature, the sound design and presentation really make every strike feel powerful. I'm already getting bored of the grab attacks though, but I suppose the series always had this problem. I must say that I did begin playing on hard but eventually lowered the difficulty to normal. The enemies were such damage sponges which, especially for a starting character with no skills, made fights a long, tedious slog, plus the feeling of power behind attacks was undercut by their health bars making it seem like I was tickling them. Not to mention that the deficiencies of the camera were exacerbated by making every offscreen hit that much harder, and fights last that much longer. I don't need to beat the game on hard just to say I did it, best to lower it to normal and have a chance to enjoy myself, which so far I have, at least more than before. - Environments are a mixed bag. A couple of areas that were part of very scripted sequences looked gorgeous: the first boss fight and the sequence with the witch, in the case of the boss fight it even tied into gameplay, by having trees get knocked down throughout the fight. However, I feel like most of the meat of the gameplay so far has taken place in bland looking small tunnels and caves. Let's see if it improves when I go to different realms. Might be because I'm also in the middle of my first playthrough of Dark Souls 3, but I miss a sense of place in the environments. A lot of it feels like a random ravine where they can place a combat encounter in, then you go down a trail in the woods to the next nearly identical ravine with the next combat encounter. The lake is the first big environment I found so far, but I feel like there isn't much to talk about it. You just hold forward until you hit a little island with some enemies and a treasure chest. The traveling feels like a waste of time. Maybe if there's another big environment later on with some gameplay elements you can interact with on your way somewhere, could be more interesting.

I didn't play JRPGs back then. I might have actually played FFVII before Chrono Cross, but the gameplay was less flashy, and I never got past the first boss. The one you can't attack or it'll trigger a counterattack. I didn't know that because I didn't understand the warning given before the fight. I was very young at that time, I found those games boring even outside the "don't understand the language" part. In the beginning I played mostly platformers with little to no reading or dialogue, like Sonic and Crash, and the occasional action game. Later some more dialogue heavy platformers like Spyro, Tomba 2, and movie-licensed games like Toy Story 2. Chrono Cross was the odd one out. I played it before some of these, and I kept bouncing back and forth between Chrono Cross and different games, slowly making progress. The one other JRPG that I remember playing a lot being Legend of Legaia. It was on the PS2 when I felt like I went from "understanding a little" to "understanding most of it", and really expanded the games I played, including getting more of a taste for JRPGs. No doubt, in part because it seemed like most games from that era, be they platformer, fighting game, or whatever, started all being full of dialogue. I think my pronunciation is pretty good. I lived in Japan for a year, and japanese people and non-native english-speaking gaijins would sometimes mistake me for an american. I got a habit during my teens to try and memorize the coolest monologues I heard, and always tried to say it just like I heard it. Ended up working as pronunciation practice.

I'd say I can speak English. For reference, the last time I had to take the TOEFL test I scored 112 or 115 out of 120. I never had any formal English education, I learned everything I know from video games, maybe a little bit from movies and TV. Sure, I had classes in school, but those basically taught me the verb "To Be" repeatedly, every single year, for 10 years or so. I remember one occasion in 8th grade when the teacher asked if we knew a certain, very simple thing, and no one else in the class knew. He was horrified that the previous teachers never covered that, and that he'd have to retrace old lessons. I thought to myself "The teachers were fine, it's just that no one here paid attention, they all did the bare minimum to pass, then forgot what little they learned". So I can say confidently that no mandatory class I ever attended had any impact on my knowledge of the English language. I think it's a matter of instant gratification. Taking classes and learning a second language can often be enriching, and pay off in the future. Learning what the hell this item you just picked up does, pays off right now. It doesn't feel like studying, it's a challenge like any other in the game. With each thing learned you're adding tools to your repertoire with which you can tackle future challenges. It has a high barrier of entry, to be sure. It's like a cumulative distribution, there's a lot to learn in the beginning, but then it plateaus and you only run into words you don't know every once in a while. If you can get past that initial daunting period where you don't know anything, then it gets really easy. Half the time you won't even need a dictionary and you'll pick up what is being said through context alone. However, in this generations, and the tail-end of the last one, subtitles in Brazilian Portuguese, and even voice acting at times have become far more common. I can't if kids now would feel the same impetus to learn English that I did, or if they do, whether it would take the same form for them that it did for me. I think the game that I can best exemplify my journey with is Chrono Cross. I was around 10 years old when I first played it. It blew me away. JRPGs had never caught my eye prior to this, just lots of text I couldn't understand and unimpressive gameplay from my outside perspective. In this sense, the graphics were really what attracted me to it. It looked amazing. But there's a bit more to it. The game starts In Medias Res, as an excuse to let you sample some late-game spells and abilities, which, for the time, were a blast to behold. Then you get to your objective and there's a weird cutscene, all you see is flashes, and I was like "What?! What was that?! Is he holding a bloody knife?! Did the main character stab the other party member?! I thought they were friends! Oh, and now the main character just wakes up in his bed and I don't find out what happens next?!". That little bit of visual storytelling blew my mind, it's what got me hooked on it. Of course, I still didn't understand anything, but I replayed that intro a thousand times trying to get it. I'd play other games, but I would always go back to Chrono Cross after 6 months or so to try and make more progress in it. Eventually, I was able to find the other party NPCs and get the quest leaving the starting town. Sometime later I was actually able to complete that quest and get the scales I needed. Then the game threw me for another loop, sending the main character to a parallel dimension where he had died ten years earlier and no one recognizes him. That's another thing that blew my mind. Got stuck again after that. Around 4 or 5 years after the first time I played it, after a much longer break since my previous attempt, I thought "Know what? I bet I can go all the way now", and I did. It was after this that I felt like I could officially say I could speak English.

I'll forgive you as long as you skimmed through the other half I haven't gotten around to play Nier: Automata yet past the tutorial. I know it's big and depressing and I just haven't been in quite the right mood for it. I've been busy playing the big and depressing dark Souls series instead. Based on what little I experienced, and everything I read, it's a mix of hack n' slash Platinum-style combat with a bullet hell. So it's not gonna be quite the same as DMC, Bayonetta, etc. Shadow of Mordor I loved, but more as the best example of the Arkham style of combat, as opposed to something brand new. The Nemesis system added the flavor and did occasionally impact combat by changing your enemies' properties. But moment to moment, yeah, it's Arkham on a bigger scale. Shadow of War isn't as good though, they tried to stretch things too much and it got repetitive. Then again Persona is my favorite series of games, with Persona 3 being my favorite game ever, so if you have a problem with those, take my opinion with a grain of salt. Although I do love that they tell really big stories and take their time doing it, and I contrast that against Shadow of War where I feel like it's not slowly ramping up further and further, it's just spinning its wheels.

Despite loving Demon's Souls and Bloodborne, I started and stopped playing Dark Souls several times. I finished it for the first time earlier this month, went straight into Dark Souls 2, and am now about to finish it as well and move onto Dark Souls 3. What cool weapons and builds do you recommend I check out on Dark Souls 3? I like to sort of plan out a build ahead of time and work my way to it. I did a strength build on DS1, with the Gravelord Sword and Pyromancer Flame, with enough stamina and the Havel's Ring to stay below the fat roll weight despite wearing very heavy armor, and I did an Int build with the Ice Rapier and Witchtree Branch staff on DS2, with mostly lightish armor to stay at around 50% weight at 15 vitality. I'd sorta be interested in something different in this next one. I was happy with my DS1 build, the Ice Rapier on DS2 was very good for bosses and PVP, but with the low stagger, no horizontal swing and huge mobs in the game, it's not that amazing in regular PvE, I'm a bit divided on it.

I don't like its penchant for taking control away from the player, and I include long sections of walking/looking around with little to no mechanical interaction in that, as well as highly scripted events. I don't like how gameplay often feels like an afterthought, both in terms of the depth of its mechanics (platforming in these games is often so linear and automatic that it feels to me less like a gameplay challenge and more like walking down a particularly winding corridor) or how it can be used to tell a story. It may be a petty gripe I have with them, but I do somewhat resent them for being held up as some of the ur-examples of good storytelling in the medium, over games that do tell their stories through an inherently interactive way, regardless of how mechanically complex they may be, like Papers, Please, The Stanley Parable or Her Story. I don't mean to say that cutscenes have no place at all in video games. I can't think of a way that games like Yakuza and Persona could tell their stories outside of cutscenes, and I do still love them, including their stories. They do still have deep gameplay, and I think having cutscenes does afford them a certain level of abstraction that allows them to have the gameplay they want to without feeling at odds with the story. As opposed to cinematic games, which do try often to rely less on cutscenes and always keep the player in a state of interaction, they feel to me like they almost fall into a gameplay/story segregation uncanny valley. With determined story sections and gameplay sections, the transitions can feel like a bright neon sign saying "You are entering the 'game' part of the game". I don't know if you would put Bioshock Infinite in the "cinematic game" category, but I felt that one was so bad in this regard. Combined with how shallow I find their gameplay most of the time, it gives me the impression that they were told they had to put some gameplay bits in it so, here, just stop and kill people for 20min before we can go back to the story. I wasn't always like this. I did use to love some of these games. Now they usually feel so superficial to me. If anything I think I appreciate games with outright cutscenes more since falling out with cinematic games. There must be a reason why despite trying to replay Uncharted 2, I game I absolutely loved, many times since I first beat it, it never once held my attention long enough for me to beat it once again. In the meantime, I finished Nioh 5 times last year. I'm not sure an exciting scripted sequence can remain exciting for more than once, but I still gotta play it. Meanwhile, Nioh's story is all cutscenes, and instead of being forced to watch everything 5 times, I can just skip it. I don't know if God of War is like that, and I will hate it. It's the one series where the protagonist stopping to kill people for 20min would not feel out of place at all. The platforming sections are probably terrible, but those always were in this series. On the other hand, I love Metal Gear Rising Revengeance, despite having big scripted QTE sequences, and even a couple of forced walking sections which are the game's nadir, because outside of that the gameplay delivered. I put an insane amount of hours into Hyrule Warriors, a series most people will call the shallowest a hack n' slash can be; and I would have agreed, until the post-game adventure mode, where it wasn't just about beating a simple level, but it was about doing it as fast as possible, with as few mistakes as possible, while trying to manage the entire battlefield at once. I saw there that despite the game having a very low skill floor, it still had a place for mastery in its mechanics, and that depth and nuance in the gameplay aren't measured solely by how many buttons I press within the span of a single second. I know God of War doesn't have the combat of Devil May Cry, it never did, but that doesn't mean it was, or is, a shallow afterthought. I really hope it isn't, and that the bulk of my time would be spent engaging with the mechanics, and that I find those deep and satisfying throughout. But I really don't know. When most of the conversations around the game I see, like with all cinematic game, all revolve around the story or some scripted boss fight, or it's some hastily written "Narrative 101" interpretation of the story, I really don't know what the gameplay is capable of. It isn't. It really isn't. I'm not sure if there's a big AAA game out there that can maintain a 30fps framerate with a 1080p resolution on the regular PS4. The trick they always go for is dynamic resolution. Where whenever things get too busy the game lowers the resolution from 1080p to 900p, or even 720p, hoping that if you sit far enough away from the TV (I don't, my room isn't that big) you won't notice it. And even then, most games don't manage to stay at 30 at times. Bloodborne and Final Fantasy XV, for as much as I love them, occasionally turn into veritable slideshows. I'll grant you though that most modern exclusives tend to fare better. I don't think Horizon Zero Dawn ever got as bad as that, even if it still had its dips. God of War, from what I read, also stays at 30fps most of the time. It is indeed a technical marvel that it does, and the zoomed-in camera is without a doubt a factor in achieving that. Low FOV has been a trick FPS games have been using on consoles for at least ten years. God of War is using it too. You may disagree with me on whether the over-the-shoulder camera came in because the graphics necessitated it, or whether they cranked up the graphics after seeing the camera allowed them to, but the game would most definitely not maintain its 30fps framerate, at this level of detail, if it had the zoomed-out camera of the older games.

Hm? From your signature, is this an "objective reviews" thing? If anything, I want a more subjective review, from a reviewer whose tastes align with my own, that might better reflect my own personal experience, and I'm bemoaning how hard that is to find, particularly when reviewers in attempting to sound more objective and impartial don't elaborate on their own personal tastes much, or put those tastes in a larger context, as a frame of reference.

I couldn't bring myself to finish the first season of Love. Everyone was just so unlikeable. On top of that, it's a comedy that isn't funny at all. Then again, that's pretty much my assessment of everything Judd Apatow makes.

I've had very limited experience with Star Trek. I watched a handful of episodes of Voyager (didn't like it), a couple episodes of Enterprise (fine), the JJ Abrams movies (first was fun, second was bad, third was forgettable), and watched all of Discovery (it was alright, always felt like watching the next episode, but wouldn't have gone out of my way to watch it if it wasn't already in my Netflix queue). I'm considering watching an older series in earnest now, starting with Next Generation. What keeps me away is hearing from Star Trek fans that the first couple of seasons of all the shows are terrible. If a fan thinks that, I'm afraid to even try it. There's the "it gets better later" argument, sure, but in the case of these old network shows it means watching 50 bad episodes before I get to the good stuff. There's no way I'm going to dedicate that much of my time in the hope that I like what comes after. I'm open to the idea of a watching list. Something that trims the show of all the bad episodes that don't affect anything in the long run, so I can go straight to the part people like, but without feeling lost, or feeling like I don't know the characters. At least for the first two seasons, I'd be open to watching it fully after the third season onwards, although from what I gathered from holodeck episodes, I think I'd like to skip those too. If I end up liking it I might do the same thing with Deep Space Nine, or maybe I'll go back and try to watch all Next Gen episodes.

I was talking about Third-Person Shooters yesterday, I guess I am sort of in the mood for playing some. It has been a while since I last played one. Figured it would be a good idea to expand the discussion. See what other people think of the genre and what games they like. First of all, I believe that despite TPS games dominating the industry for a good 5 to 7 year period, they haven't been analyzed to quite the same extent that, say FPS games, have. You might find some think-pieces grumbling about cover-based systems, but there doesn't seem to be quite the direct antithesis to them, in the same way, that modern FPS games with regenerating health and cover are contrasted with 90s FPS shooters with health packs and bunnyhopping. Or at least, I haven't seen quite the same battle lines drawn between cover-based TPSs and run and gun TPSs. This leads to the question: What are the best Third-Person Shooters you've played? What makes a Third-Person Shooter work for you? Do you see yourself favoring one direction over another within the genre? Or do you think they're all mostly the same? I have to say, I have always been mostly lukewarm on the genre. Particularly during the height of its popularity. When it felt like whenever a developer had a certain idea or property they were interested in, when it came time to ask "Okay, but what is the gameplay like?", the answer was inevitably "I don't know. Make it a Third-Person Shooter, I guess". Even with regards to games I did undoubtedly enjoy, like Red Dead Redemption, mechanics-wise I mostly considered them to be just passable. So I stopped to think about what my favorite TPS might be, and I think it is Shinji Mikami's Resident Evil 4. Which is curious, one of the granddaddies of the genre, certainly influential, is still one of my favorites in the genre. And I'm not usually one for nostalgia. What's different about it? I think the thing with me is that I was never such a fan of either cover-based TPSs or run n' gun TPSs. I find the gameplay a bit too stale in both cases. Either you stay behind cover as much as possible, only pop out to shoot, or to move to a different cover; or you spend your entire time running to avoid shots while trying to land your own. Or at least that feels true for the skill-level in which I play at, if you play online at a high rank, your experience might very well be different. Resident Evil 4 is an interesting third way because it limits your movement when shooting. You often have to run from enemies and reposition, but you can't shoot them while you do it, nor can you run forever. At some point, you have to stand your ground and shoot while the zombies are running straight at you. It's tense. It rewards skillful play as well. Ammo is scarce, and well-placed shots to weak points can disarm enemies, or open them up to melee attacks that both conserve ammo and do a lot of damage. I think that's what I really love about that game. It's the tactical choice of when to move, when to shoot, when to go for the body, when to risk going for the weak spots, when to close in for a special melee move. As much as I love my walking simulators, I also love my mechanically-complex, over the top Japanese action games, and Resident Evil 4 I think is one of the very few examples of those sensibilities being applied to a shooter instead of a hack n' slash/beat 'em up. Resident Evil 5 was not as creative and fun as RE4 in my eyes, but I do think it was still mechanically sound, at least in so far as combat mechanics. And Resident Evil 6, though it's maligned by many for ditching horror pretty much completely, as an action game and a Third-Person Shooter I think it's great. The TPS games outside of the RE series that I can think of that I would put on a similar level would be Shadows of the Damned and Vanquish, the latter being a much more fast-paced game though, both of which are also Shinji Mikami games. This is just my personal feelings towards the genre, but I'm curious if anyone else has similar views or, if they don't, what exactly separates a good and a bad Third-Person Shooter in their eyes.

The Remaster's devs are working on yet another remaster at the moment. I thought it could be of interest to people here. Are there any games you would be looking forward to a remaster of? Personally, hearing this just makes me think of how much I hate the lack of backwards compatibility of consoles, leading to the same games being sold to consumers over and over again.

I tried playing Shadow of the Colossus several times way back on the PS2. I always got bored and stopped playing after 3 to 5 colossi.

I have tried to get into Monster Hunter in the past, in particular Monster Hunter 3 on the 3DS, but all those attempts ended with me inevitably losing interest after an hour, swearing i'd get back to it the next day, not touching the game again for another year, at which point I start another New Game from scratch. Rinse and repeat. I took a leap of faith with World, and I'm glad to say it paid off. It is definitely way more accessible. It is still obtuse, don't get me wrong, but not to the point of driving me away. I still haven't found a weapon that really clicked with me, but the open-ended gameplay and fighting these huge monsters, then turn around and fight somehow even bigger monsters creates constant moments of wonder. Although, I feel like I'm in that state of mind where I only have negative things to say about the game. Not because I don't like it, I am enjoying it very much. It's just that unless I'm specifically prodded and directed towards a specific positive subject, I will naturally drift to talking about the myriad little things that don't work with the game which, despite not ruining my enjoynment, are just more interesting to talk about for me. I don't mean to wreck the mood right in the second post of the thread, so I'll stick to two things that have been bugging me: 1. The game has no named characters That's a bold narrative choice. I never expected the game to have a deep story, nor was I under the impression that previous Monster Hunter games ever did (except perhaps the very deliberate exception in the recent Monster Hunter Stories on the 3DS). Still, going as far as not naming anyone? It feels like it's screaming "WE DO NOT CARE ABOUT THE STORY". That's not to say the game has no characters. You are introduced to your handler in the opening cutscene and immediately embark on an adventure with her. She is a constant presence throughout the game, through which you take on new quests, and receive in-game advice geared towards the game's systems. She has no name. She is forever called "The Handler". When you first land in the mysterious continent the game takes place in, another hunter saves you from a giant moster. That hunter then shows you around your home base of operations, and is a constant source for combat advice in the game. He is the "Field Team Leader". These are voiced characters with plenty of lines, featured prominently in the story with many, no doubt expensive to make, cutscenes dedicated to them. Yet no one ever bothered to name them. I'm flabbergasted by this attitude. I don't advocate that a gameplay-focused loot-grinder like this should have dedicated too many resources to the story, but the story and characters are certainly here, and you are forced to watch more than a few cutscenes with them, that they would end up as such a boring pile of nothing feels wrong, and not naming a single character strikes me like underlining and circling the problem with a bright red pen, making it impossible to ignore. Also, I'm reminded of the Merchant in Resident Evil 4, and how it managed to be so memorable without a name or impact in the plot, just by looking and sounding really weird. Even if you never explored any of the backstory of the NPCs in the game, I think the game would be elevated if the "Second Fleet Master" that forges your equipment, and you'll dedicate so much of your time to, was memorable in any way. 2. Colonialist undertones This is a less structured and even more subjective complaint. In the opening cutscene, when they first said they were about to reach the "New World", I cringed. The game tries to frame itself as respectful of nature. NPCs occasionally drop a line about how it's about understanding nature, not killing. But the fact is that the "Mechanic Is The Message" so to speak, and no matter what these NPCs say, the core gameplay loop is still to waltz into this foreign ecosystem, kill these majestic creatures so I can make a new pair of boots, with which I can kill other majestic creatures. That loop by itself is one none of us are strangers to, I'm certain. But there's something about framing it as "The New World", by making your base of operations an overseas colony. Ostensibly meant for research, according to the narrative, but nevertheless one that takes everything from the environment around it, including its living creatures, to sustain itself. Suddenly this old gameplay loop of ours brings images in my mind of big game hunters. Of rich white men posing for photos in front of dead elephants and lions. The vast majority of the mosters you kill are not a part of any world saving quest after all, they're just the tenth of its kind you fell in row because you need more scales to make a coat. I wonder if I would have ever felt similarly if the place was framed as your hometown and not a colony. I wonder if there was a better way to deal with the same subject. At least so far, I haven't seen any natives beyond the monsters. Is this a bad thing? Like the way that history often erases native people's contributions and frame the colonists are the source from which civilization flows from, and ignoring any claims of stealing resources? Would the game be worse if this "New World" did have its own native people? It's a game about contributing to an overseas colony, how would you frame that? Like I said, these are minor things. None of them make me dislike the game. It's just that these things are there and I can't quite work them out. I can't quite understand why the game has a story, and as many cutscenes as it does, when it clearly has no interest on it, bar them feeling like they had to have that to be considered a AAA game, and I can't quite wrap my mind around the game's themes, whether intended or unintended.

Apparently FX is trying to make a Welcome to Night Vale TV show, with the podcast's creators working as executive producers in it. https://www.avclub.com/fx-is-developing-a-welcome-to-night-vale-show-1821139534 I thought maybe this was the kind of forum which might also be interested in Welcome to Night Vale and be excited by this news. I admit, I haven't listened to it in a while. Since episode 80 something, I think. It's not the sort of podcast that I can listen to in the background while playing a game, so it's harder to fit into my schedule when compared to others. It was, however, the first podcast I ever listened to, and I like it very much. A TV show based on it has the potential to be just as brilliant as the podcast. I have no idea what form it would take though. I imagine they would ditch the community radio format? Perhaps leave it only as a framing device? As it might be too stationary for a TV show. Then again, maybe the budget won't be that big so they'll need the format to say things are happening offscreen? Has anyone here read the Night Vale books that were written? I'm under the impression they follow other characters. I have no idea what the narrative is like in them, but they might be a good indication on what path the TV show might take.

Battle Chef Brigade It's part 2D hack n' slash a la Muramasa, crossed with match-3 puzzle game. It's about an Iron Chef-inspired competition, with two chefs going head-to-head by running out of the kitchen, killing monsters, gathering ingredients, and bringing them back for cooking within the time limit. The combat is fluid and responsive, and the puzzles get increasingly more complex as the game progresses, with the introduction different types of gems, limited-moves gems, combos, and specialties which reward you for particularly difficult dishes. I bought this on whim based on the weird premise alone and I was not disappointed. Cooking and the Iron Chef competition isn't an easily ignorable backdrop. The story mode is the star of the show here, and they create a world that revolves around cooking monsters. My biggest surprise was how pleasant most of it was though. Almost everyone was super-friendly. It takes at least a couple of chapters for conflicts to get more serious. Before that we still have the competition, and they could've gone the obvious route and made every opponent an over-the-top villain, but instead they are all very sportsman-like, and quick to become friends with the main character. I didn't know how much I really wanted to play something this upbeat and lighthearted until it already got its hooks in me. Now I'm left looking for another fix, with no idea where to find it. Best case scenario: maybe the sales will be good enough that the devs can afford to do the updates they're planning.

Well, he is supposedly making World War Z 2, that seems way out of his wheelhouse. I loved the show. It felt almost...scary I guess. I know it's a thriller, but stuff like Kemper's monologue straight to the camera in episode 2 gave me way more chills than most horror movies. When I found out that Kemper is a real guy and that those scenes were at least based on real interview transcripts... oof, that was unnerving. I do mean this in a nice way though. The show didn't feel exploitative to me. I would compare and contrast with shows like Law and Order SVU, or even Criminal Minds which is about the FBI's Behavioural Analysis Unit as well. Those shows aren't R rated, but I always felt like they were trying to get away with as much as possible. They at the same time condemned and reveled in the violence in display. Mindhunter on the other hand, despite being R-rated, felt like it showed less violence by comparison. Yes, there were a few striking moments of it, but usually it was just a polaroid picture being held at a distance and such. It comes somewhat with the territory, considering it isn't a show about catching a serial killer, but rather a show about talking to them. P.S.: The real Kemper as it turns out was involved in an inmate project where he and others recorded audiobooks for the blind. Here's an article about it on the LA Times, from the 80s. And if you're mildly curious, here's a tiny snippet of one of those audiobooks he recorded:

I've quite enjoyed the game. Leveled two characters to 290+. It has some problems, but as long as the shooting actually feels fun, it's just the sort of time sink to play while listening to something else that I was looking for. I already had Civ 5 for that, but sometimes I do want something a little more hands-on. I wanted to stay up to date with the coming expansion, unfortunately though, the season pass is way too expensive. I'll have to wait and see if I find it on sale someday.

I am of the mind that it isn't all that hard (same as the Souls games), you just have to be okay with the idea that you might have to die quite a few times before you get the hang of it. It took me about 8 hours and 302 deaths to beat it, and I certainly don't fancy myself that great at the game. However, talking about it with someone else, they told me they found the game to be quite difficult indeed. It took him about 16 hours and some 790 deaths to do it. Now I don't know what to think anymore. Am I actually really good at the game and am judging others by an unfair standard? Does the guy just suck at the game? I have no idea how close either of us might be to the average person's playthrough. I wish there was an actual bell curve of some sort where we could check.