Let's Sperg Pete vs. His Steam Library - Because sometimes games are homework

[Xarpho]

This is exactly what I'll probably do later on, because I'm already starting to build up games that I can't get into or don't really know I have.

 

[Splendid]

I'll just congratulate whoever made the game for staying the hell out of the player's way. All the non-game parts of the game were kept to a minimum, and as hazy and hallucinatory as it got in places, it never tried to make any bold statements about... oh, I don't know, audience complicity in fictional violence or what-the-fuck-ever. So thank you, weird game-design nerds, for not thinking you were changing the world.

Hotline Miami is actually about the dangers of nationalism.
This becomes more clear in the sequel though.

 

[Handsome Pete]

First: mailbag!

This is exactly what I'll probably do later on, because I'm already starting to build up games that I can't get into or don't really know I have.

I've considered editing the OP to make this the Neglected Games Support Thread, just because this seems like a pretty common phenomenon that we all pretend doesn't happen because Chris does it.

Hotline Miami is actually about the dangers of nationalism.
This becomes more clear in the sequel though.

Is that something I would know if I'd found more than 2 of those hidden letters? I do want to play the sequel at some point; I'd be happy if it was just a glorified level pack, actually, since the first one was a bit short.

And now, the Final Fantasy update.

Jesus Christ. I knew I wouldn't finish this one just because FF games are always long, but in the interest of fairness I decided to at least play up to the point where I'm allowed to select my own party members. I'm 20 fucking hours in and that hasn't happened yet. Except for a couple boss fights, they've only let me have two people in my party at a time. It's like the Autphag thread: it's long, it's tedious, and most of the dialogue is cringeworthy, but you stick with it just in case something entertaining finally happens.

 

[ActualKiwi]

First: mailbag!

I've considered editing the OP to make this the Neglected Games Support Thread, just because this seems like a pretty common phenomenon that we all pretend doesn't happen because Chris does it.

Is that something I would know if I'd found more than 2 of those hidden letters? I do want to play the sequel at some point; I'd be happy if it was just a glorified level pack, actually, since the first one was a bit short.

And now, the Final Fantasy update.

Jesus Christ. I knew I wouldn't finish this one just because FF games are always long, but in the interest of fairness I decided to at least play up to the point where I'm allowed to select my own party members. I'm 20 fucking hours in and that hasn't happened yet. Except for a couple boss fights, they've only let me have two people in my party at a time. It's like the Autphag thread: it's long, it's tedious, and most of the dialogue is cringeworthy, but you stick with it just in case something entertaining finally happens.

Would I be terrible if I said I knew this would happen and that was entirely the point of suggesting you play it?

 

[Handsome Pete]

Would I be terrible if I said I knew this would happen and that was entirely the point of suggesting you play it?

Honestly, it would be a relief. At least we're all on the same page.

And I'll say this: it's a bad game, but it's an amazing writing prompt. Every single aspect of this game demands to be nitpicked in clever ways. I know I'm a bit late to that party, but hopefully I can come up with something halfway-original.

 

[nvrn19]

LISA LISA LISA LISA LISA LISA. It's like the antithesis to Undertale; a quirky, funny crapsack of a world where you're playing as a broken man in the midway of his life with far too much mental baggage to carry. Also, fishman lawyer.

If not that, then Anodyne and Evoland were fun, quick little indie thingies to play in my spare time.

EDIT: You might wanna play Lisa the First beforehand just to get some backstory so things make at least a little bit more sense. It's free anyways.

 

[onc]

To the Moon

Do it, it's just 4-5 hours long but may result in 4-5 days of feels.

 

[Handsome Pete]

First, mailbag:

LISA LISA LISA LISA LISA LISA.

Do it, it's just 4-5 hours long but may result in 4-5 days of feels.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=9QfPDmzpC2Q

Damn, my stupid little thread has turned into a whole thing. It might take a while if I'm playing these in the order they were requested, but it'll happen. Especially now that I'm done with @ActualKiwi's request for...

Why I originally bought it:
I used to be a fan of the series, and curiosity got the better of me.

Why I stopped playing it:
I was 4 hours in and hadn't had any fun yet.

How things went this time:
Prior to posting this, I wrote several versions of this post, in which I sperged about everything wrong with this game, and singled out the battle system for some extra abuse. Then I deleted almost everything I wrote, because what would the point have been? Everything that can be said about this game has already been said by better writers than me. The bones have been picked clean. The "exploration" is too linear, the combat is almost fully automated, the characters are boring (except for the token black friend, who I unironically liked), and the story revolves around a bunch of people who have no idea what their quest actually is.

So instead, let's talk about the thing that made me stop playing. This is going to be long, so I'm dividing it up.

Spoiler: Part 1: The In-Game Experience

Not long after my little "update" post a few days ago, I finally got my wish: the game let me choose my party members. And what did it ask me to do with that new power? Why slog through yet another linear dungeon and fight more copies of the same enemies I'd been fighting for the last hour. I didn't mind, though, because at least I didn't have Hope in my party anymore.

(Hope, for those who are wondering, is the worst character in any Final Fantasy game, and possibly any game, period. He might be one of the worst characters in the history of narrative across all media, past and future. He's basically the JRPG version of Connor Bible, except he weighs about 90 pounds and has a voice like Sonic the Hedgehog minus the attitude. I cannot think of a less appealing combination of traits.)

Anyway! So there I am in another shitty dungeon, headed toward a boss fight with a guy who looks like some kind of Harajuku Pope. And the fight, when it finally happens, is horrible. He turns into this big robot named Barthandelus with five (!!!!) targetable spots and proceeds to lay waste to my sad little party because this game's battle system locks you out of most of your moves at any given moment. So I swapped around my party members, upgraded their equipment, and took another crack at it.

The battle was slow as fuck, but that was to be expected; battles in this game take forever. It's like they realized the dumbed-down combat made everything too easy, and tried to compensate by giving the enemies obscenely huge health bars. Slowness I could live with, though. I chipped away at the five targets until, finally, it was just my party vs. the big robot. And hey, that was slow too, but I was surviving. As long as I had one character healing every now and then, I was fine.

And then, with his health at about 2%, he aimed a couple attacks in a row at my lead character and killed her. And in Final Fantasy XIII, if your lead character dies, that's Game Over. Doesn't matter if your healer is still alive, doesn't matter how many Phoenix Downs you have, you're stuck doing this boring-ass fight over again.

I'm proud to say I didn't ragequit. I marched right back into that boss room and killed that fucker. Then I turned the game off because there are a million better ways to waste my life.

Spoiler: Part 2: The IRL Experience

Remember back when I wrote about Amnesia, I said that my cat was a source of comfort during the scary parts? In this game, he was a source of unfathomable sadness. During that same boss fight I described in the previous section, he started meowing from the hallway. "That's unfortunate," I thought, "but if he wants attention he knows where to find me."

He walked right past my desk - where, as I said, I was engaged in a life-or-death struggle against some kind of Robo-Pope - over to his toybox, and got out a ball. His favorite ball. "Just a minute, bud," I told him, "As soon as I kill this robot thing." He began halfheartedly swatting it around, but it was clear he wanted me to put down the goddamn controller and pay attention to him.

After the robot was dead, I was of course stuck watching another 5-minute cutscene. And you don't walk away from a cutscene in this game, because there's always a chance it'll end with you dumped into another boss fight. My cat, meanwhile, had taken his ball out to the hallway to chase it around without me. There have been very few times where I felt like a game was causing me to miss out on life. This was one of them. And that's my advice to anyone reading this: if you have a choice between playing Final Fantasy XIII or playing fetch with a cat, pick the cat. It's what I ended up doing, and I'm happier for it.

Spoiler: Part 3: What can we learn from this shitty, shitty game?

Again and again, I've seen this game compared to the Star Wars prequels. The people making it got so fixated on designing a beautiful fictional world that they forgot to have anything interesting happen there. The backgrounds are very pretty, but they're never more than just backgrounds. The fights are dull, but there's a whole lot of sparkly shit flying around so hopefully that will distract everyone.

There are a thousand little things to be fixed in this game. I understand the desire to cut straight to the action, but if that means the plot has to be delivered through tedious flashbacks, that kind of defeats the purpose. And simply using a conventional turn-based battle system would have improved my opinion of this game immeasurably; a dumb storyline isn't enough to kill a game on its own. If it were, this series would have ended long before its thirteenth installment.

They say good design is 99% invisible. In other words, when you look at a thing, you don't think of all the decisions that went into making it; you just see the end result as if it sprang into existence fully-formed. The same goes for game design. And that's Final Fantasy XIII's greatest sin: it keeps calling attention to its worst parts. It's impossible to get into a groove and really inhabit this world, because there's always something that interrupts the flow of gameplay. And for whatever reason, Square decided those interruptions should be the main draw.

Has DSP played it?
All the way back in 2010. He told more jokes back then, which means he was somehow even less funny.

Stray Thoughts:

• I kept finding excuses not to play this one, partly because it was boring but mostly because I would have been embarrassed to be caught playing it.
• The typical gamer stereotype is "smoke some weed, then decide to play vidyagames." This game was the opposite: you'd play for a while, then start thinking maybe weed would make it go a little faster.
• This game has an "Easy Mode." How? What other features are even left to remove?
• The equipment upgrades are one more thing that suck in this game; the system is slow, the items that provide the upgrades have wildly uneven drop rates, and - not that this should matter - the screen where you perform all the upgrades is ugly. I would have been perfectly happy just buying a new sword every so often.
• I mentioned that the token black friend was the only character I liked. I'll go further and say he should have been the protagonist. A middle-aged everyman becoming a reluctant hero in order to protect his son? That's maybe a bit more relatable than whatever the hell this game's ostensible "hero" was doing.
• Now that I say it, how great would a JRPG with middle-aged protagonists be? Those games always have the previous generation's heroes passing the torch to the teenage protagonist, so why not a game where the old guys get the gang back together and go on the quest themselves? "Don't you see? The Empire is only a distraction! The true enemy... is osteoporosis!"
• To this game's credit, at least Snow had a reasonably masculine voice, instead of sounding like a sniveling anime boy. The game still had a sniveling anime boy, of course, but I've bitched about him enough. The adult characters all sounded like adults, which is rare for a JRPG.
• Well, maybe XV will be better . Of course, I'm too indifferent/broke to buy consoles, so I'll have to wait for the mediocre PC port.
• Speaking of mediocre PC ports, there doesn't seem to be any graceful way to quit out of this game. You can quit to the title screen, but from there you have to just hit Esc, which brings up a screen full of glitchy-looking Windows vomit. It's like my computer's immune system is violently rejecting this game. If there's a better way, they really, really make you hunt for it.

Spoiler: Windows Vomit

So yeah, everything about this game was a disaster. The only reason it did well is because it was part of a popular, long-running series that used to be good. That's also the only reason I own it, and the only reason I bothered writing so much about it. It's only worth analyzing in the context of the games that preceded it, and it's only interesting as an example of how far a series can fall. Then again, despite being underwhelmed by every aspect of this game, I still want to finish it, just to see what they were hoping to accomplish. So maybe the developers knew what they were doing after all. Or I'm just a masochist.

But I'll do that later. Now it's time for Transistor.

 

[Splendid]

• I mentioned that the token black friend was the only character I liked. I'll go further and say he should have been the protagonist. A middle-aged everyman becoming a reluctant hero in order to protect his son? That's maybe a bit more relatable than whatever the hell this game's ostensible "hero" was doing.

• Now that I say it, how great would a JRPG with middle-aged protagonists be? Those games always have the previous generation's heroes passing the torch to the teenage protagonist, so why not a game where the old guys get the gang back together and go on the quest themselves? "Don't you see? The Empire is only a distraction! The true enemy... is osteoporosis!"

This this this this this.
The fact that they didn't make Saz (I think that was his name?) the fucking protagonist is insane.

 

[Handsome Pete]

Finally, a good one! Transistor, courtesy of @Azazel. Well, they've actually been mostly good so far, but that last one had me a bit jaded.

Why I originally bought it:
I loved Bastion, and this was made by the same company.

Why I stopped playing it:
I loved Bastion a little too much, and didn't want to play this one until I could devote my full attention to it.

How things went this time:
Transistor is beautiful. And I don't mean that in some bullshit way, like "It gave me feels" or "It takes interactive storytelling to a bold new whatever." I mean it literally: Transistor looks and sounds great, it plays... reasonably great, and its elements all perfectly complement one another. The music suits the visuals, the visuals suit the story, the story suits the gameplay, and you could re-write that sentence with all the nouns swapped around and it would be just as true.

That's all lovely, but how's it play? Well, I'm a bit biased because I just played Final Fantasy XIII, and Transistor gets right everything that FFXIII got wrong. FFXIII parceled out its story in cutscenes; Transistor borrows Bastion's running narration (and its narrator). FFXIII completely failed at making a hybrid real-time/turn-based battle system; Transistor makes it look effortless. And no doubt that influenced my opinion of the combat because, objectively, it was probably a bit too frantic and disjointed (and, objectively, I sucked at it). But good lord is it ambitious: your weapon has a dozen-plus equippable moves, each of which can be combined with one or two other moves, resulting in hundreds of potential combinations (thousands if you unlock every move and every upgrade slot). Plus passive bonuses. Plus, the game encourages you to try out as many combinations as possible by only revealing lore entries when you change up your moveset. And it all plays out in what's basically a 2-D isometric version of the V.A.T.S. system.

So the combat is the main draw, which makes sense for a game that takes its title from its primary weapon. But the combat is also decidedly not for everyone. I dug it; you might not. What really makes Transistor special is that it simply feels cohesive. Nothing feels out of place, and everything has a reason to be there. The gameplay could have been terrible, and I'd still speak glowingly of the overall gestalt because that's how right they got it. Between this and Bastion, it's clear that Supergiant is a studio that prizes immersion and world-building over mere showing off. They get that there's no point in making a pretty world unless players want to spend time there.

Spoiler: Art Sperging

One thing I love about Supergiant is that their approach to art is almost comically literal-minded, but it somehow always works. The art for Bastion just took cowboy stuff and Arabian Nights stuff and threw them together in the same room. Literally, saloon doors on a hookah bar. And it somehow made perfect sense. The music followed suit: country-Western played on decidedly Eastern instruments. And it quickly became one of my favorite scores of all time, and the only game soundtrack with a spot on my iPod.

Transistor pulls off a similar trick. I can only describe its look as "heavily deconstructed cyberpunk." It really does seem like they found an artist who had never heard of cyberpunk, told her that the word "noir" comes up a lot, and waited to see what would happen. The result is an art-deco city with a public computer terminal on every corner, simultaneously more fantastic and more dystopian than re-re-recycled Neuromancer tropes could ever hope to be. At this point, I'm confident that you could pick any two disparate visual styles out of a hat, and they'd find a way to make them pretty.

Has DSP played it?
Like, some of it, kind of. There are no good Transistor TIHYDPs because he played so little that they all have to rely on filler.

Stray Thoughts:

• Sorry for all the Bastion comparisons, but when a studio's only made two games, it's sort of inevitable that people are going to measure them against each other.
• I'm usually not someone who bothers learning the names of voice actors, but I damn sure know Logan Cunningham. He's that perfect combination of "insanely talented" and "not actually famous" that means he gives it his all, even though it's just a video game.
• I never did figure out the "right" way to fight those dog enemies. Not even a cheap way. It was just a matter of letting them beat my ass until the game said I was allowed to combo them.
• Red's a silent protagonist, but she's not a blank slate; the game makes a running gag of her tendency to start writing inflammatory comments on articles, only to delete them and post something benign instead. I'm pretty sure that's an experience every (unbanned) Kiwi can relate to.
• If I have a complaint, it's that you're not allowed to revisit areas. Yes, players hate backtracking. But players love autistically hunting for that precious 100%.
• Five minutes in, I was sure we were headed towards a Matrix twist. It's a reveal that never quite comes, although the last few minutes of the game deal with multiple layers of reality and virtual reality, so one could argue that it's still implied. Maybe things get more clear after multiple playthroughs, or after you've unlocked everything. This is a game I'm definitely going to revisit, so I suppose I'll find out for myself.
• Keeping Red mute throughout the game makes her single word of spoken dialog ("Hey.") genuinely powerful. It's rare to find writers in any media who understand the value of silence, and finding one in the world of video games is a goddamn miracle, but it happened.
• The plot of this game reads like a sci-fi dramatazation of a wiki edit war. I'm OK with that.
• Dude, I am listening to the soundtrack right now.

OK, so maybe I fanboyed a bit on this one, but it's been so long since I've felt the urge to fanboy over anything that it was nice to discover it was still possible. Next on the list is the first of @Lipitor's suggestions: Batman: Arkham City: Game of the Year Edition: The Movie: The Game: Brotherhood: Revengeance: SVU: Miami:....Now.

 

[Azazel]

@Handsome Pete Glad you liked it. One of my favorite non-RTS games. And yes the soundtrack is goddamn amazing. One of the only soundtracks from a game I've ever bought.

 

[Splendid]

Red's a silent protagonist, but she's not a blank slate; the game makes a running gag of her tendency to start writing inflammatory comments on articles, only to delete them and post something benign instead. I'm pretty sure that's an experience every (unbanned) Kiwi can relate to.

You are such a goddamn stupid retarded fucking tranny faggot that you actually believe that the cucked cocksucking mods who would willingly drink Trump's piss just for a chance to be the OP in a thread about Christine's most recent Facebook update about her ratty socks or whatever the fuck just so that they could farm douchey winner ratings off of an asinine joke about legos will actually ban your worthless ass for anything you post here.

Forgot to write tag people, so I'll just double post:
@AnOminous @Valiant @Vitriol @Null @KatsuKitty@Dunsparce @Flowers For Sonichu

 

[Handsome Pete]

@Handsome Pete Glad you liked it. One of my favorite non-RTS games. And yes the soundtrack is goddamn amazing. One of the only soundtracks from a game I've ever bought.

Really, I just started this thread as a writing exercise for myself, but I like the way connections and contrasts between the games have emerged. If Transistor had come up earlier or later, it might not have won me over like it did. That's not to say I only liked it because it let me take a few more shots at Final Fantasy. But that didn't hurt.

You are such a goddamn stupid exceptional fucking tranny faggot that you actually believe that the cucked cocksucking mods who would willingly drink Trump's piss just for a chance to be the OP in a thread about Christine's most recent Facebook update about her ratty socks or whatever the fuck just so that they could farm douchey winner ratings off of an asinine joke about legos will actually ban your worthless ass for anything you post here.

Kind of a long way to go for that punchline.

 

[Splendid]

Kind of a long way to go for that punchline.

Fuck, there's no fucking agree button on this forum.

 

[Randall Fragg]

Forgot to write tag people, so I'll just double post:
@AnOminous @Valiant @Vitriol @Null @KatsuKitty@Dunsparce @Flowers For Sonichu

You forgot me

 

[Splendid]

You forgot me

I opened up the admin fucktard shithead listing and saw just how many of you losers there are so I just tagged a few at random.
You're my 3rd favorite admin though <3

 

[DeadwastePrime]

I'd recommend playing the walking dead season one. Pretty good game. Also yes, DSP played this game along with season two and literally every telltale game post walking dead. Maybe Jurassic park. I don't know about that though.

 

[Handsome Pete]

And just like that, we shift gears into Triple-A Blockbuster Land with Batman: Arkham City.

Why I originally bought it:
I liked Arkham Asylum, so no shit I'd get the sequel

Why I stopped playing it:
I took one look at that upgrade screen and felt the icy hand of my own mortality closing around my neck.

How things went this time:
Let's rewind a bit to the original suggestion for this game:

The batman game is an obvious choice... It's a 9/10 polished triple A experience... No surprises. Just what you were looking for. It's really well done and what you expect out of a batman game. It's not super easy, but an average gamer should be able to beat it without too much of a struggle.

And that's exactly what happened. So with that out of the way, let's talk about open-world games in general.

My problem with "open-world" games is that, too often, they're actually "where-the-hell-am-I?" games. Batman has his grappling hook/glider combo, and the developers clearly put a lot of work into making the game's rooftop navigation feel smooth, but that comes at the expense of ground-level movement. Like, I get it. You're Batman. The only time you visit ground-level is when you're kicking someone's ass. But too often, you (the player) are safe ignoring the actual geography of the world and just propelling yourself to the next map marker. Being on the ground is such a rare experience in this game that you need to use Detective Mode just to find the front door of most buildings.

Now, that's a nitpick. It's a problem you run into in lots of open-world games. GTA - arguably the grandaddy of modern open-world games - would be unplayable without the mini-map. The issue is that a lot of open-world games, Arkham City included, don't really need to be as open as they are. Your goals are always clearly marked, the main quest mostly progresses in a series of indoor levels, and most of the side missions could stand to be tightened up a little. The actual open world ends up feeling like between-level filler, or a place to farm experience if you want to get every single upgrade.

I'm not saying it needs to be purely linear, but maybe do it like Arkham Asylum or something? Hell, that could be good advice for a lot of games that try to do the open-world thing when it's not necessary. The issue is one of escalation, though: companies want to be able to brag about the huge world they've created. They want to advertise the 50-hour main campaign, or the lifetime's worth of bonus missions, or the time-sucking collection quests. You're competing in a maket where a game's bigness is considered a selling point whether or not that works for a given game, and everyone wants to stand out.

But bigness isn't really impressive anymore. Games are less and less confined by physical media, and as impressive as your gritty open-world city is, there's some nerd in Sweden who can whip up a procedurally generated continent on a fraction of your budget. What the studios can still do better than the indies is polish, the kind of spectacle and lived-in detail that you can only get from a large team working with a decent budget. Which is all a very roundabout way of saying I liked Arkham City's variety (and its parade of classic villains), but preferred Arkham Asylum's tighter gameplay.

I could also sperg about this game's place in DC continuity for another ten pages, so I'm cutting myself off here.

Has DSP played it?
He actually sucked a little less than usual. He still sucked, though.

Stray Thoughts:

• I've always had a soft spot for the villains whose grudge is against Bruce Wayne rather than Batman, but letting them know Bruce Wayne is Batman kind of ruins it. Which is to say, I'm the only person on Earth who likes the Penguin, and I was happy to see him featured so prominently and treated as a legitimate threat.
• Arkham Asylum doled out the boss fights sparingly, but Arkham City does the opposite. It makes sense, what with the sheer number of villains featured, but a lot of them seem like they're looking for any excuse to start a fight. You spend most of the game being allies with Mr. Freeze, except for the five minutes where he freaks out and you have to fight him for no reason except someone thought it would be neat.
• Likewise, there are a couple fights that just come out of nowhere. When a D-lister like the Mad Hatter can pop up and hijack the narrative for five minutes before disappearing just as quickly, it ends up feeling like they couldn't figure out where to put that sequence and just shoehorned it in at a random spot.
• Nobody made fun of this game for having a "Pay Your Respects" prompt. Apparently people care more about Thomas and Martha Wayne than they do about dead soldiers. That seems about right.
• It's weird that Marvel and DC both have characters named Dr. Strange (well, DC has "Professor Strange," but that implies he has a doctorate in something), but I guess that's not as weird as them both having guys named Captain Marvel. Also, why do you drive on a parkway and park in a driveway? And what's the deal with airline food?
• This was the Game of the Year Edition, so I also got to play as Catwoman a few times. It was OK. A game where you play as an actual cat could be cool.
• The Arkham series is proof that "dark and edgy" doesn't have to mean "joyless," no matter what Zack Snyder says.
• Is that the canonical pronunciation of Ra's al Ghul? Wouldn't have guessed. Cool boss fight, though. Maybe one phase longer than it should have been.
• "We need a memeworthy image for our game!" "Batman punching a shark?" "Good enough!"
• I know Grundy's supposed to be intimidating, but the whole time I was fighting him all I could think was "Solomon Grundy want pants too!"
• Calendar Man is supposed to be autistic, right?

It may not have come across thanks to all my bitching, but I loved the hell out of this game. Which makes sense; it's a product designed to simulate being Batman, and it does that job by hitting every part of the Batman power fantasy. Whether you're a nerd who loves all the detective shit, or you just want to beat up 20 guys at once, there's something for you here. Which is probably why everyone already played it before me.

So, @Lipitor made three suggestions, but for variety's sake I think I'll save the other two for later and just move on to... let's say @nvrn19's suggestion of Lisa.

 

[Ravelord]

I would suggest You Have To Win The Game, its not too difficult and if you like retro platforming stuff you will probably enjoy it.

 

[Handsome Pete]

I would suggest You Have To Win The Game, its not too difficult and if you like retro platforming stuff you will probably enjoy it.

I've been kind of slacking on this project lately because I've had a lot of real life stuff (including a sick cat) popping up, and vidya is comparatively unimportant.

But dammit, I made a vague promise to say reasonably clever stuff about people's game suggestions, and I'm going to stick with it for some reason!