tegan

I Had a Random Thought (About Video Games)

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I started it, played some with my wife. The WiiU version has some extra edutainment stuff. I can't fully recommend it because I haven't finished but it is a nice puzzle platformer with cute graphics and neato Alaskan native art and themes. Only bad thing I can say is the character physics and collision can get kind of janky sometimes.

 

If you like how the trailers look might as well give it a shot.

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Never Alone is imperfect, but good on the whole. Get some Native American storytelling, you probably haven't had much before, and probably never in a video game.

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I wrote a massively long reply as to why I dislike Never Alone, but thought it was a bit too negative. It's not an expensive game, it has its heart in the right place, I just think it fails miserably at what it was trying to do.

(I also don't like Valiant Hearts, but whatever).

 

If it's not too expensive on eshop, get it, you might enjoy it, but don't expect too much from it.

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I am curious griddlelol as to just how negative a reaction you had to the game. Were you playing it alone? I'd imagine that makes the game significantly less pleasurable.

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I was considering starting a thread after I finished it but I am probably only 5/6ths there still. I have good and bad thoughts but I don't want to speak too soon. You could start one critical Griddlelol, I don't mind.

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I don't want to be too down on a game that's clearly trying to do something good.

 

I played with my partner, and we both agreed it wasn't fun at all to play. The movement felt poor and the puzzles were difficult because of the bad movement. Other than that, it's a very simplistic game. The bola controls are awkward also, again to the point that simple puzzles are difficult because of that. It was frustrating rather than challenging, and we both switched controllers but neither of us could find enjoyment from it.

 

My main gripe with it, is that it fails at what it attempts to do, i.e. introduce you to an unknown culture through play. The videos you earn don't really have an significance in terms of what you're doing and given no reason to actually watch them, other than tangential interest. The learning should be integrated into the game, and not require you to go through a menu to watch something. I didn't want to stop the game to watch a video, I can do that just by turning my head and looking up something on youtube on my computer. The videos might as well not be there.

 

If they had integrated the learning into the play, rather than being entirely separate from it, I think I would have gotten past the game play issues, and it might have been interesting.

 

My problem with Valiant Hearts is more simple - I just disliked the juxtaposition of slapstick comedy villains with the actual tragedy of WW1. Put the tone all over the place and I found it a little too jarring. 

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My problem with Valiant Hearts is more simple - I just disliked the juxtaposition of slapstick comedy villains with the actual tragedy of WW1. Put the tone all over the place and I found it a little too jarring. 

 

I felt like Valiant Hearts maintained a decent tone throughout the first half, and then it descended into mustache-twirling supervillains with steampunk megatanks. My imagination of it is that they wrote the first half as a labour of love, then they realized their videogаme was half as long as a videogаme of that type ought to be if you want to sell it, so they churned out some padding, which led to things like re-using the excellent "dodge obstacles on your way to the front line of the war" driving sequence in a new context where it has zero emotional value.

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Things like that make me wish games could be as easily re edited as directors cuts of films, or fan cuts. In theory you can mod some games to do that, but it's nowhere near as simple as as cutting a movie to stitch it back together.

(note that I know that recuts involve a lot of artistry, but relatively little technology overhead compared to games where moving stuff around can break sequences and progression)

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Things like that make me wish games could be as easily re edited as directors cuts of films, or fan cuts. In theory you can mod some games to do that, but it's nowhere near as simple as as cutting a movie to stitch it back together.

(note that I know that recuts involve a lot of artistry, but relatively little technology overhead compared to games where moving stuff around can break sequences and progression)

 

 

I remember my reaction to Doom 3 and Rage was that a fan edit to cut out all the RPG and backtracking shit would have done wonders for those games.

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Things like that make me wish games could be as easily re edited as directors cuts of films, or fan cuts. In theory you can mod some games to do that, but it's nowhere near as simple as as cutting a movie to stitch it back together.

(note that I know that recuts involve a lot of artistry, but relatively little technology overhead compared to games where moving stuff around can break sequences and progression)

 

There are a few examples I can think of, although none are as extensive as a movie recut.

 

KOTOR 2 has a mod that restores a lot of cut content, sort of a deleted scenes feature. Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines has a mod that rejiggers a lot of existing content and even adds new quests, but it's more of a remaster than a recut. Finally, there's some ME3 ending mods which technically qualify as a proper recut, but for the most part they're just cutting things rather than editing or reordering things, and their scope is limited to the ending despite that game having a lot of problems beyond the ending.

 

I suppose the ending update that Bioware themselves put out after the ME3 ending scandal is probably the closest thing to a recut we've ever gotten.

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That reminds me, I still don't really know how ME3 ends. My fancut of that series is just that it stops with my ME1 ending

 

I didn't save the council so when they died humans reorganised the council with Shepherd as a morale boosting mascot. Too bad game 2 literally undoes every part of that to just have a new council that's exactly like the first one.

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That reminds me, I still don't really know how ME3 ends. My fancut of that series is just that it stops with my ME1 ending

 

That is the correct fancut. ME1 told a story that was a perfect rendition of Lovecraft in space, and as soon as you get to ME2 it shifts from "We may have saved the day, but the Old Ones are far greater than us and one day when the stars are right, the Old Ones will return and we shall surely perish" to "YEAH! Let's go punch Cthulhu IN THE FACE!"

Even if they had handled the ending of ME3 better, there's the unavoidable thematic problem that any sequel to ME 1 will undermine the original because a sequel will necessarily say that we can defeat the incomprehensible aliens who represent our cosmic insignificance. And the main instrument of our triumph isn't even something thematically functional, it's one Shepard who is particularly good at cover-based shooting.

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But to be honest, the best fighting game on the PC for beginners is Skullgirls. Not only is it really fun, but there is a really deep and interesting tutorial that not only teaches you how to play, but explains in detail how it can be useful, as well as it being completely transferable skills that you can use in all other fighting games. Totally transferable to ArcSys games.

 

Thanks, N1njaSquirrel! I'll give Skullgirls a try - I've heard nothing but good things about it, but I forgot about it until you mentioned it! I'll pick it up during the winter sale, probably. Can't wait to start punchin' things with slapstick jokes - I'm into that aesthetic!

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I'm not part of this conversation, but i'll jump in and also say that i think Skullgirls is both pretty great and relatively accessible. (As fighting games go, at least, there's still a seriously high ceiling there. Try to find a group of friends to learn the game with.) The PC version is super good too, that GGPO netcode is ace.

 

I will say though, Skullgirls tries really hard to present a good-for-beginners tutorial, but i know a lot of people who could not complete more than a handful of the tutorial tasks.

 

Edit: Also, as a person who has played a whole lot of BlazBlue, i will say the Continuum Shift Extend port up on Steam is pretty solid, and it's a terrific game, one of my favorite fighters. It's a more complicated game than Skullgirls, it's got buckets of incredibly diverse characters each with their own specific systems to wrap your brain around, but i think Arc Sys does really good tutorials. (Fair warning: Last i played, the PC port had a weird issue where you couldn't disable the in-game voice chat online. If you have a mic, you're always broadcasting to your party. That was the only real problem to speak of though.)

CSE, like Skullgirls, also has excellent netcode, maybe better.

 

(BTW: Calamity Trigger is also on Steam and Chrono Phantasma Extend will be on Steam in January. Calamity Trigger was the first game, it's not worth going back to and the port was terrible. Chrono Phantasma Extend is the newest game, and i'm a little out of the loop on the series, but i think it was in general not as well liked as the Continuum Shift iterations were, but maybe you'd want to wait for that port instead if you're interested in BlazBlue.)

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Anybody played Underrail? It's an isometric, turn-based RPG. Read a thread about it on Neogaf and it sounds good, lots of positive reviews on Steam as well.

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I was going through my old gaming stuff at my mom's house so I could tell her what to do with all of it earlier today. It's been in a chest here for some 10 years, and I haven't wanted or needed any of it, so I figured it would just be me going through a bunch of stuff and being like, "Get rid of all of it!" That happened a bunch, but also I found out that I have some games that go for a lot of money on eBay.

 

Does anyone have any experience with selling things on eBay? I don't even remember what this Demon's Crest game is, but I have the game with the box and instruction book which I guess goes for a lot on there. I also have Final Fantasy 2, which sells for like 50 dollars for some reason? I don't know. I have old games that I can sell for decent money, I guess. I won't regret it since the actual physical games themselves mean nothing to me (except that Adventures of Lolo I've got in the original box with the booklet, but I'm keeping that), but I have no concept of what it's like to sell old games (or anything) on eBay. Does anyone have any experience with that? Is it something I should pursue with these things?

 

tl;dr i have old games that might be worth something and i need to get rid of them, how does ebay work

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Ebay is easy! Just follow the Sell A New Item procedure from your My Ebay/Selling menu (this is all from memory, may be phrased a little differently). Putting something up for sale is itself pretty intuitive. Just do a search first for the same item you're trying to sell and filter it down to completed listings or whatever to get an idea of what prices it has successfully been sold for previously, then make sure that you set the starting price at a point where you won't lose money after postage, ebay fees, paypal fees etc (or that you'd make so little that it's not worth your time). Also, I tend to describe the state of the item very fully and set to no refunds.

 

If you set it too high and it doesn't sell, you can always just re-list it at a slightly lower price and repeat until you get some interest (you won't normally get any listing fees, but keep an eye on those just in case).

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No, that's correct. You set the postage (within limits) but you can also put it to zero.

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Does anyone have any experience with or knowledge of Hanako Games' latest offering, Black Closet? The Steam reviews are universally positive and I figure that "quasi-procedurally generated intrigue simulator as the student council president of an all-girls school" is a slam dunk, but there's been almost no critical reaction since its release in mid-September and one of the hosts on TMA mentioned it as a charmingly crap game in their episode on Thea: The Awakening, so... I don't know.

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Giantbomb has a video on it. I came out of it wanting to pick it up, but it's definitely a bit different. Did you play Long Live the Queen?

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Am I the only one who gets irrationally, somebody-didn't-push-the-clear-button-on-the-microwave level angry when I hear people say "Sness" instead of "Ess En Ee Ess" when referring to the Super Nintendo?

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