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Feb 16th, 2024 at 14:08:43 - Ghostrunner (PC) |
Completed! I powered through my nausea and played this in like 30-60-minute chunks for the past month-and-a-half. I was usually good for a level or two at a time. I'm definitely feeling a little barfy right now, but I had to finish. I would power through the nausea again to play the sequel if it's an improved version of this one.
Ghostrunner was really novel for me. It's a first-person melee parkour game (Mirror's Edge-ish). You are basically a cyberpunk ninja, the titular Ghostrunner, who awakens at the bottom of a dystopian cyberpunk city, having fallen from a great height. A voice in your ear, called The Architect, guides you along and feeds you story. The story was whatever (big bad overlords of shitty cyberpunk city repress the people, resistance movement, fight fight fight, overlords go wild with power to further repress the people and realize their insane version of humanity, etc.). It didn't matter what I was doing anything for, really. I was content with wall-running and slicing enemies with my sword and feeling like a badass. The set pieces of levels in this game are where it's at.
And that's what the game was for me, a "badass simulator." Especially while feeling nauseous, it was nice to play as a badass. The melee parkour action took some getting used to, especially the slo-mo stuff, but once I got the hang of it, it was great. The game is sort of Hotline Miami-ish or Superhot-ish whereby death is not penalized. You'll restart immediately where you were and try whatever combat and/or parkour sequence over again. I'd finish levels with 75 deaths or more. No problem! As you play, you do unlock some special abilities, but I didn't use them often because your running, slicing, and dicing is efficient enough. After you get the best/last one, the mind control ability, the game is basically over anyway.
There were a few boss fights that were a bit lackluster. In the first one, you basically just memorize a samurai's sequence of sword attacks, execute what you memorized a few times, and you're good. The second one was a platforming puzzle and probably the most interesting, climbing a death tower. The third and final one was kind of like the first one, but more complex. Learn a few patterned enemy attacks, avoid those attacks enough times, and win. It was kind of weird that the final boss stands in one place and does some easily avoidable repetitive attacks. You'd think she'd be more adept in combat, more creative, more powerful. But she died, just like the samurai first boss and the death tower second boss, easily enough.
So yeah, definitely neat and worth checking out. I'll play the next one in 30-60-minute chunks too, and hopefully won't blow chunks while doing so.
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Feb 9th, 2024 at 09:11:58 - The Last Campfire (PC) |
I would describe this game as "pleasant." I read someone describe it as "soothing," to which I would also agree. It's a little puzzle and adventure-lite game with cute art direction, a colorful world, a positive, hopeful story, and a narrator whose voice was certainly soothing.
You play as an "ember" trying to find its way home. You get thrown off course and have to find your way back. In so doing, you meet a variety of other embers who are lost and wandering, many of whom have given up hope of ever finding their way back. When you encounter one of these "forlorn," you must solve an environmental puzzle to inspire them. The puzzles were generally easy, yet thoughtful. Occasionally the difficulty would shoot up or down. Most puzzles took probably 5 minutes. One time, I was stumped on a puzzle. I'd spent 20 or 30 minutes poring over it. Finally figured it out (and felt very smart!). Got to the next puzzle and solved it in about 10 seconds.
Another thing that made the game difficult for me is that there is no map. There is a world that you're (using the term loosely) exploring. It's not that big, and the game begins linearly. Then it opens up and you'll be doing all sorts of backtracking, looking for forlorn, bringing items here and there for characters. Since I was generally playing this like once a week, I wasn't constructing a very solid map of the world in my mind. I'd get turned around, forget which paths led where, where characters were, and so on. It led to a fair amount of extra time spent wandering around (which I guess gels with the theme). But I would have rather had a basic map. By the time you get to the last chapter though, the game is linear again. It was strange having it be linear, then more open, then linear.
To the point about it being open in the middle, the amount of time you spend in each area varies based on how many forlorn you care to save. Each area has a campfire, with a ghost, and the forlorn whom you rescue go sit around the campfire. The ghost will give you hints as to where the forlorn in the area are located. When you get enough (I think it was four), then you can request that the ghost open the path to the next area. Or, you can continue asking for hints to find all the forlorn (usually around eight). I liked this option to spend more time searching for forlorn and solving additional puzzles. In a couple areas, I found most of the forlorn, and in a couple I went straight to the next area once I had my required amount.
Overall, yes, cute, cozy, soothing. If you like this kind of thing, you'll probably enjoy this. It is nothing I needed to play, but it was nice.
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Jan 13th, 2024 at 16:01:38 - Ghostrunner (PC) |
I was going to add an entry for Yakuza 0, which is another (like Binding of Isaac) that I've been playing for a few months, but I need to get away from the computer. I feel nauseous. This is Ghostrunner's fault, and why I am writing anyway, because I had to stop playing it. This is the second time it's made me feel nauseous. After the first time (when I thought I might have just been tired), I turned off motion blur, head bob, decreased the resolution a bit, and increased FOV. I made it about twice as long before starting to feel bad, so that's good. I think I should be able to keep it up in chunks of 90 minutes or so. I have to get my head around the slo-mo dodge though. It feels unintuitive for me to pull off, holding left shift, then moving whichever direction to dodge, then letting go of left shift and having my character dash forward instead of to whichever side I moved him. I think that the last thing I did before turning it off this time was to finally figure out the slo-mo thing. But I'm excited to get more upgrades.
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Jan 13th, 2024 at 15:56:04 - The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth (PC) |
I want to add some entries to a couple games I've been playing for a long time. I rarely do more than one entry for a game anymore, which often results in long post-game reflections instead of more in-the-moment thoughts. There's a lot of stuff I forget. The Binding of Isaac has left some imprints though. At this point, the game is nearly a decade old and, I imagine, quite different and many times bigger than it once was. I mean, there are currently 637 achievements (of which I have 29). I'm looking at old completion data and someone listed 178 achievements, another 403. I would be annoyed if I got a high percentage of achievements, and then the game expanded, added more achievements, and my percentage dropped. People 100%ed it way back when, and now that first person has 178 out of 637.
Anyway! When I started this, I was planning to compare it to Nuclear Throne, which I thought had a similar art style, but the games are really different. The Binding of Isaac is quite claustrophobic, whereas Nuclear Throne's screen had more space. Nuclear Throne is also faster and more of a bullet hell. In Binding, you progress through a series of chapters, each with a few types of areas (e.g., Chapter 1 has the Basement and the Cellar). Down you go from area to area, chapter to chapter, until you die or kill whatever big bad boss awaits. The game has been added to so much that there are many big bad bosses now. I assume there were fewer originally. It starts with Mom. In the game, you are traumatized by your religious mother, who attempts to kill you with a knife after she becomes brainwashed by Christian TV, and you find a trap door to the basement as you flee (thus starting Isaac in the Basement area).
In each area, you go from room to room until you find the mini-boss and/or exit. There are a variety of room types, from those with just monsters, to shops, to arcades, to treasure rooms, to secret rooms, etc., etc. I am still unclear on the full list and what they all do. But the general strategy here is to acquire items to beef up Isaac so you can go as far as you can in the run. He shoots "tears" as his weapon, and these can be modified to be bigger, faster, wobble, and so on. You can also find upgrades to Isaac's speed and health. There are literally hundreds of items, and I have no clue what the vast majority do (because I haven't found most of them). Even the ones I have found, I still don't know what most of them do. There are no tooltips for the items, or an encyclopedia that provides information. This makes The Binding of Isaac feel very much like groping about in the darkness (appropriate, as is Isaac) and often proceeding on trial and error. Or rather, proceeding on a constant cost-benefit analysis of what you think might happen when you pick up this item or take those pills. The effects are often negative.
It took me a handful of tries to beat Mom for the first time, and that only unlocked new chapters, areas, and bosses. Like I keep saying, there are hundreds of items, hundreds of unlockables, hundreds of achievements. Like, so many hundreds of all this stuff that it is nearing a thousand. Some things unlock after you beat xyz boss; others after you perform xyz action or collect xyz things. I have started playing the game to unlock what it tells me I can unlock (e.g., saving up 50 coins to unlock a new character). Different characters have different starting stats and items. There's one I like who has really low health, but can float, and thus avoid a ton of obstacles and gain access to chests and things that are across gaps that other (walking) characters can't pass.
I finally started looking some things up though because it's still so overwhelming. I haven't played long (about 8 hours over 5 months), and maybe it's a matter of playing more regularly to remember things better, but runs feel really different from one another. The more I played though, the better I have gotten, and I've killed Mom a handful of times now, as well as killed Satan and Mom's Heart (a couple times). I have no idea how long it will take to kill all the bosses (or even to unlock them) and get all the endings (there are like 20-something). But it's really fun, and it's a good one to play when I have like 30 minutes.
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