Inspired by this topic, I went through some old GW-related files on my computer, found a folder named "interesting" from 200X, containing only the following file named "reality69.gif"...

I think that was one that I made? I know it was a Pokey bootleg and not a real one, and I did make a bunch of those, making sure to get the font right and everything, but that was so long ago that I actually can't claim credit 100%. I guess that's good that it has withstood the test of time either way, but.......

Quote from: A1A1inE8 on January 11, 2024, 04:26:29 am

Inspired by this topic, I went through some old GW-related files on my computer, found a folder named "interesting" from 200X, containing only the following file named "reality69.gif"...

I think about this stupid random quote like once a month even now almost 20 years later. Make it stop.

If that was me, sorry about this. Kinda. I'm kinda sorry. I'm also a lot not-sorry, but also still probably kinda sorry in some nebulous, unquantifiable way.

i bothered logging into this place for the first time in a year, so i'm gonna make myself post at least halfheartedly in this topic. the reasons for this are not clear to me at the present time, though this might change by the time this post has completed.
 
i just finished yakuza: like a dragon. more specifically, i actually bothered to finish the ENTIRETY of the yakuza series over the course of a couple years, all eight fucking games. maybe this information is pretty public knowledge now, but it's really pretty shocking how good that entire series of games is. i remember first hearing about them years ago and being pretty quick to just dismiss them as just another grand theft auto clone that nobody needed. hell, maybe it even was like that at first, i've only played the remastered versions of the game's earlier entries, but that's not something i can say about the series anymore. i'm hesitant to talk them up as some sort of creative masterpiece or something, but they're really a surprisingly nice series of games. pretty earnestly funny, and with a story that really takes its subject matter surprisingly seriously, and goes in directions you wouldn't expect a series of yakuza stories to go. gets a little hammy at times, but that's about the extent of criticisms i could muster for the series. it's fun, consistent, and very often great stuff.
 
and like a dragon is no exception. for the hell of it, they decided to reinvent the series as a jrpg, and it actually really works. it's not what i would consider an UTTERLY FANTASTIC rpg really, they were a little too preoccupied with the transition to the rpg system and the story slightly suffers for it, at least compared to some of the other, more impressive entries in the entire series. still a nice, well-meaning, fun game though. it's kinda like what persona 5 would have been like if that fucking cat wasn't there constantly making you go to sleep.
 
beyond that, i ended up falling down the goddamn rabbit hole of visual novels after playing steins;gate. you can probably scroll up and see where that happened. i figured i was missing out on something special after playing stuff like steins;gate and the zero escape series, and this ended up being correct. i distinctly remember storming around the internet back in the day, generally pissed off that nobody out there was bothering to try telling compelling stories in the whole game medium, since there's been room for that from the very beginning. but i didn't really think it was something that would ever happen beyond the occasional brief, nearly-unplayable douglas adams cameo and that we'd otherwise just get stuck with a billion call of duty games with the occasional post apocalyptic rpg that has surprisingly little to actually say about anything, least of all the actual notion of apocalypse. but i was wrong, actually. a couple pretty goddamn great writers snuck into the medium under this visual novel guise and actually wrote a couple pretty great stories. go fucking figure. so i started playing them a couple years ago, figuring i'd run out of really good ones pretty damn quick. i didn't.
 
because i'm such a fucking champion of the people, and if you've read this far into my post you must be at least vaguely curious, i'll even list a couple that i thought were legitimately excellent experiences, far better than anything i thought i'd ever live to see come out of videogames, or hell, even most movies and television shows i've been finding. maybe this will be useful to somebody, i dunno. most of these fucking things are over a decade old, and i'm really disappointed that i'm just now finding them. i wish i had somebody to force this shit on me, particularly those visual novels that look fucking atrocious but are actually surprisingly wonderful experiences. so i'm doing that for you, in large part because i'm kinda pissed off that none of you fuckers told me to go play umineko, which every person with an even peripheral interest in game writing absolutely needs to experience immediately.
Steins;Gate
Muv-Luv&Muv-Luv Alternative
The House in Fata Morgana
Umineko No Naku Koro Ni
Chaos;Child
428: Shibuya Scramble

and yeah, i know, some of these look fucking awful. you don't have to say it, i already know. actually, most of them, at first glance, look completely terrible. like half the damn list were games i picked up on a steam sale and then only played reluctantly during a period of excruciating boredom, usually because the reviews were so overwhelmingly positive that i wanted to prove to myself that they couldn't be that good. but each of these are goddamn excellent stories and i actually fucking hate your guts if you have a negative opinion about any of them. especially the house in fata morgana. i REALLY fucking hate you if you have a negative opinion of that one.
 
i still don't know why i made this post and lost interest like seventeen times when i was writing it. i came this far, so i might as well hit the post button. doesn't matter either way, there isn't a soul alive that's actually gonna read this unless i force the link on dada because he is TOTALLY DEFINITELY not completely sick of me losing myself in this ecstatic fugue whenever steins;gate is ever even suggested.

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Is this the user you're talking about? http://saltworld.net/forums/user/27146-hedge1/

Who the fucking hell on this planet would actually buy a Tyler Danish or Jeanmar Gomez jersey? I'm into baseball and all that, and I cannot imagine that there are literally any lifeforms on the planet out there with even the vaguest of interest in buying the jerseys of those two gentlemen. These are the sorts of players whose own mothers probably shred their son's jerseys to make dishrags. How fucking hard does one need to hit rock bottom for selling something as worthless as this to become a good idea?

I feel so bad for your sad, fucked up life that I'm not even going to edit this one.

Everyone, please buy a Jeanmar Gomez or Tyler Danish jersey. This spambot is apparently in desperate need of our help.

many thanks thanhquy2207, you are an asset to our community
 
 
*USER WAS BANNED FOR THIS POST*

Someone shout at me if it's not okay to upload this

 
Unless something has changed in the last couple years, it should be ok. I actually contacted Diggity a while after I made my last post in here, asking how he felt about my continuing to circulate it, and he seemed to find some novelty that people out there might still be listening to it and giving a shit about it after all these years. The only condition was that nobody try selling it or rebranding it or something, but that's not happening here.
 
So anyway, thanks for reposting this. I feel like a turd being some BIG IMPORTANT FUCKING GUY here and posting it and then letting the links fall dead after my own hosting vanished.

There's something slightly reassuring about posting on a message board that nobody thinks to visit anymore. Like digging a hole, whispering your secrets to the barely exposed earth within, and then furiously filling up the hole again. Only a couple eyelashes separate the postings here from being nothing more than a dream. The words written here are almost invariably more for the writer's benefit then they are for anybody else.
 
 
so i played the visual novel steins;gate. i don't know what that semi-colon means or is there for.
 
what is immediately apparent in playingreading steins;gate is how utterly repellent the main character, and your narrator, is. if there is one thing that can unquestionably be learned from steins;gate, it's the word chuunibyou, roughly 8th-grade syndrome(more literally middle school second year syndrome), where the sufferer exhibits immature, childlike delusions. our hero, hououin kyouma(also known as okarin[also ][/also]), has this, and the story's writers used it as license to have him go around treating the entirety of the cast seemingly very badly. he is impossibly smug, and feels the need to bookend virtually every other line of dialogue with this affected "maniacal laughter" that i frankly found so off-putting that i began actively skipping the voice actor's voiced lines if i suspected that i would have to endure that laugh again.
 
notably, steins;gate is a science fiction game quite literally lifted from the collected works of john titor, so much so that you could quite fairly label the game a comprehensive example of john titor fanfiction. it's become abundantly clear in recent years that the real-life titor phenomena was, as most people probably guessed, an elaborate but generally well-meaning hoax, so it's within one's rights to consider the game an act of plagiarism to some extent. i, personally, do not, but this is a conclusion someone could come to and probably justify somewhat elaborately. regardless, the science fiction of the game is otherwise rather reality-based and literate, sometimes impressively so, though a complaint some have expressed is that the game slightly devolves into technobabble, which is probably fair, but can probably be dismissed as a feature rather than a bug due to the types of characters this game features: scientists namely, both actual and wannabe. the biggest and fairest complaint, however, is that the science of the game is very conveniently warped and re-structured to aid the story. it's a time travel story, but the game takes some bizarre liberties with the concept of time-space paradoxes, and then scientifically cops out by not keeping the game's presentation of memory in-line with how the science of the rest of the story works. it can, then, be slightly perplexing trying to follow what is scientifically accurate about the work and what was manipulated and skewed to service the story, but then, the game isn't exactly intended to be a work of pure education, so i don't know how much you can hold this against them.
 
the glue that holds the rest of the gamestory together is this seemingly typical slice-of-life fare that really never manages to be especially interesting. the characters themselves have relatively dull, apparently unchallenged lives, with the chief point of persistent conflict being their ability(or inability) to tolerate the hououin kyouma persona. you have your best friend, the ditzy but sincere and well-meaning cosplay fanatic, the repulsive otaku who feels the need to repeatedly verbalize his obsessive eroge activities and his reprehensible fetishes, the bizarre catgirl who works at the local maid cafe and unaccountably inserts -nya into every sentence, and has seemingly more latent psychological damage than even the main character, and i could probably keep rattling off a who's who of not intrinsically interesting character tropes that the game provides but does not seriously endeavor to make interesting during these slice of life sections. i found myself thankful in the early going when i could escape all of that and the characters returned to their cheap, childish, makeshift laboratory above the equally inconsequential crt repair shop. at least there they'd throw some science at you, which was a nice change of pace, even if it wasn't adding up to a noteworthy equation. they claim that this game is one of the biggest tear-jerkers in the history of games. i knew this up front, and i remember smirking to myself, wondering how anybody could cry over these people.
 
i was twenty hours into this fucking story without even knowing why i was even continuing. it's almost embarrassing that i even stuck with it as long as i did, as i didn't find much to like about the characters, and the main concept, while something i would call innately interesting, wasn't going anywhere and was overloaded with apparently inconsequential bits of fluff that wasn't making for a particularly valuable experience. they were building something, and i just didn't care what.
 
you reach a point where you realize that the structure of the entire game is just this gigantic, flimsy house of cards, kept together by sheer innocence and will alone, with only the forces of inertia keeping it together. But just when I had convinced myself that there was nothing to this game, they pulled the bottom load-bearing card, and the story collapsed upon itself.
 
This is, of course, the trick of the story. They lull you into this long, deep, comfortable, familiar sleep, only to violently wake you, dazed and bloodied, the world filled with terror, those important to you dead. There's some minimal gameplay in this game, I guess. You have a phone, and people call or email you, or you can call them. It gives you some added flavor text and, much later on, can determine some story paths or one of the multiple endings of the game. You play with this innocently for hours, texting whatever the fuck bullshit you wanted to anybody. It doesn't matter, you'll pretty naturally think to yourself, it's just a fucking phone. You pretty freely tap the R2 key to see that phone come spinning out of your pocket during the first half of the game. I found myself pausing a lot longer before pushing that button during the second half of the game. I didn't want any more of my friends to die.
 
There is a pretty distinct tonal shift halfway through the game, and it almost exclusively involves the characters that you've been learning about and getting to know. Be it my own subjectivity, or something I personally needed when I played the game, the characters in this game really did it for me, though it was done covertly at first. Yes, they aren't individually, on the surface, very interesting. There's something rather dull and familiar about almost all of them, but within each of them remains this critical depth that the story very carefully keeps from you until you need to know it. Definitely rather boring, but from that boredom and complacency, for me at least, came something rather stunningly real and identifiable. You see these characters in their daily lives, their silly fixations and habits, and the game goes to impressive lengths to depict them as actual people, not dynamic superhumans. They're kinda boring, but they aren't unlikable. They're all pretty carefully crafted as fundamentally decent people, with resoundingly positive traits mixed in with all the mundanity. Context, here, is everything, particularly when each of these people get their turn to have their entire lives torn completely to shreds. You see what each of them has to lose, the pain they've all been keeping hidden, and the story is designed to systematically exploit absolutely every single one of them at their most vulnerable spot. That first half of the story that didn't seem to be amounting to very much, seems to amount to an awful lot when it's time for that character's card to fall. It's all a setup, and I found myself pretty profoundly moved by the plight of these characters more times than I could even begin to remember. They claim that this game is one of the biggest tear-jerkers in the history of games. While everyone's perspective is different, and others may not be able to get into the experience of this game as much as I did, my perspective can otherwise validate this claim. I had genuinely lost the ability to cry due to advancing age and an otherwise misanthropic view of the world, but this game has actually helped me restore that ability. Again, that's a perspective unique to me and the point in time when I played this game, but this experience and these words are unique to me, so you'll just have to fucking deal with it.
 
What is probably most stunningly impressive about this game is the overall structure of it all and the way they utilize familiar science fiction to get the absolute most out of the drama and conflict present within the story. The story is one gigantic butterfly effect, where you encounter this constant stream of seemingly random things happen that turn out to be monumentally important later in the story. As some lame chuunibyou with an unconvincing and probably repellent writer persona myself, I find it slightly staggering how they were able to keep track of all the bits and pieces in the story, and manage to tie together virtually everything in the end. There's some minor plot holes and unconvincing pseudo-science that they had to fall back on, but it's hard to hold this against the writers given that the intent behind such decisions were to show more about the characters themselves, and to further intensify the magnitude of their conflicts. If you're in it just for the science, however, it'll probably tickle you regardless. I know who Roy Kerr is now, and hearing the man's name now terrifies the fucking shit out of me, even if he's just some genius New Zealander that's good at science, not some dude inadvertently destroying the universe. Regardless, the structure of the whole thing is so perfect that I almost need to actively note that there was probably some luck involved on the part of the writers, who kinda stumbled onto this completely brilliant idea for a story, and had the dedication and sensitivity to get the absolute most out of it. I played the sequel to this game, Steins;Gate 0, and while it's also a legitimately impressive game in its own right, and is admirable for how it fearlessly takes the first game's most overtly terrifying nightmare ending as its canonic basis, and does pretty profoundly deepen the experience and texture of the first game, it does completely lack the structural sharpness of the first Steins;Gate story. As does everything else I've ever played.
 
I guess my problem with Okabe Rintaro in the first few hours of the game is that I didn't want to identify with him very much. He, and his chuunibyou alter ego Hououin Kyouma, are pathetically vain and insecure, rude, doesn't quite often enough consider the feelings of others, and has an unpleasant texture to him. I'd like to think that I'm not like that, we probably all do. You're subject entirely to his point of view throughout the course of the game, so if at no point at all you are able to connect or identify with the character in the slightest, the game will fall pretty tragically flat. And the first major portion of the game, for me, it did. My impression of Okarin ranged somewhere roughly between repulsion and embarrassment, identifying with him just enough to stuck with the game and experience it with him, but being consistently disappointed whenever this Kyouma persona would come to life and shout something stupid and irrelevant. The game, a visual novel with limited interaction, somehow, incredibly, has a difficulty curve. And that difficulty curve is Hououin Kyouma. Hour ten in the game, fucking hated him. He'd stand up on a table and scream !HOUOUIN KYOUMA! and I wished Kurisu would hit him with a heavy book or something to shut him up. Hour fifty, when Okarin can't even begin to muster even a fraction of the flourish he once could, as the proclamation of the name hououin kyouma comes dribbling, weakly, out of his mouth, without conviction and seemingly lowercase, you realize that the stupid juvenile defense mechanisms we use to defend ourselves against the cruelty of the world is the only thing that keeps us tethered to a world that wants nothing more than to cast us aside, or to bend us to its own cold, passionless image. It's one of the instances of magic in the game, I'd argue. We're all that stupid, frightened kid, praying to the forces of the universe, and whatever indifferent god that lords over it all, that it not take our friends away. Strip away all the guises and all the bullshit, and little else will remain. I ultimately felt guilty for ever skipping over that stupid maniacal laughter of his. Okarin needs this. We all do.
 
I don't pretend anymore to be some great universal barometer for the quality of videogames, and my preferences almost invariably trend towards how much the story or subsequent experience as a whole affects me. Gameplay is nice but inessential, and I don't need the experience to be profoundly reactive, or for me to have some sort of heightened sense of active agency within the work. With that (hopefully) clear, Steins;Gate is the greatest videogame I have ever played, and possibly will ever play. There's a lot more to my experience with this game than I've chronicled here, but in some outside chance a lonely, lost traveler from another worldline stumbles upon these words, I have avoided talking in great depth about any of the specific elements and why I believe they worked. Could if anybody wanted, I guess, but it's dangerous to know too much about the future. Just know that this is a really impressively structured and told story, easily the best I've ever encountered in a game. That semi-colon is the only thing in the entire game that remained unexplained. I still don't know what it means. And i don't need to know.

when the last breath of life is exhaled from my worthless corpse, and i descend into the abyss, ready to vanish forever into the infinite ether, i shall be brought face to face with the previous unseen, unheard, unfelt, and unsuspected almighty. it will look down on me, a scowl of unimaginable consternation, and proclaim YOU, WHO THINKS THAT YOUR PUNISHMENT OF SENTIENCE IS OVER, CHOOSE YOUR NEXT FORM.
 
i will gaze fearlessly into the face of my tormentor, and say.......
 
i wish to be reborn as the sort of person who joins a message board specifically to link to joe rogan's website

If anyone can explain what this forum is, the history of it, and the reason it was created that would be pretty cool.

1. write an unintelligible paragraph about dark souls or something else that nobody could possibly be particularly interested in. make sure you have not capitalized any words or included much punctuation. print it out using a thirty year old dot matrix printer with a tattered, decomposing ink ribbon. carefully take this printed page outside your dwelling and locate the nearest manhole cover. lift the cover and descend into the abyss, making sure to leave your flashlight behind. start walking. continue walking. do not stop walking. ignore the terrible shrieks and groans echoing through the vast corridors around you; if you do not see them, they cannot see you. as soon as you are able to tangibly describe the feelings of exhaustion, fear, and misery pooling in your stomach, stop walking. fumble your way through the dark to the nearest wall. take your very important dark souls paragraph from your satchel(if you didn't think of bringing a satchel, you're absolutely fucked) and apply it to the wall. at this point you will undoubtedly have cut yourself on unseen jagged edges on the wall, so you can use your blood as an adhesive. pause for a long moment and reflect on this extremely important thing you have just done, and, if enough blood remains on the inside of your body, congratulate yourself on an excellent forum post.

at this point you might ask: "USER 4466, I HAVE TRAVELED MANY, MANY MILES TO THIS SPOT, AND HAVE POSTED THIS VERY IMPORTANT DARK SOULS PARAGRAPH THAT NOBODY COULD EVER POSSIBLY READ. I HAVE LOST A LOT OF BLOOD AND DO NOT HAVE THE STAMINA OR HIT POINTS TO MAKE IT BACK TO THE SURFACE, WHERE I MIGHT REJOIN CIVILIZATION. WHAT IS THE USE OF SUCH A JOURNEY IF IT HAS TAKEN ME TO SUCH A BARREN, DESOLATE PLACE? WHY DO YOU RISK YOUR PRECIOUS BODILY FLUIDS TO VENTURE TO SUCH A FORSAKEN WORLD?"

i will then sit there, silently blinking at you, hoping that the passage of time results in you forgetting the question.
eventually, time will pass.
and you will forget the question.

this is what saltworld is. have fun and post lots.

2. people posted here once. they're gone now. only the tumbleweeds remain.

3. nobody who is still around was around when the forum was created. i am told the universe is full of such mysteries, but i never leave the sewers long enough to find out.

What's the first Persona you played? I don't have anything newer than the wii, but is the PSX Persona any good?

The PSX Persona actually was the first one I played, and I know it was in 1999 that I first played the thing, because I remember trading in my recently purchased copy of Silent Hill for store credit to pick up a used copy with a badly cracked jewel case that looked like it had been sitting at the bottom of a swamp for several weeks. I loved the fucking shit out of that game when I played it back then, but that actually was over half my life ago, and I haven't gotten all the way through it since. So any advice is going to be colored by some heavy nostalgia for the thing, since I haven't really sat down and really earnestly played the thing in a period of time closing in on 20 years.
 
I think one of the real appealing things about the game is that it really doesn't resemble anything else anybody else was doing at that point in time(except for the other bizarre games Atlus was making at the time[most ][/most]), yet still had all these familiar things in it nonetheless. Like the game takes place in a familiar-feeling city, you play high school students, you have to go to class and do some shit like that, but it's coupled with awkward first-person dungeon crawling, this strangely literate and expansive mythology, and what is probably the most surreal battle system that's ever been in an RPG. Even the soundtrack hits this strange yet familiar note, as much of it seems to deliberately try to evoke feelings of muzak, or some other such rubbish you'd hear pumped through late 90s department store speakers.
 
I think more than anything else it's worth playing for the demon negotiations, though. You have to catch demons in the game by talking with them, generally talk them into fighting with you. The thing here is that there's A LOT of overall text for this system, and Atlus decided to not really iron out all the grammatical mistakes and awkwardness in the translation, so most of the conversations you're going to have will be random, stupid, and unintelligible. There exist unpleasant purists out there who see this as a travesty, but I absolutely fucking loved this about the game. It all becomes surreal and hilarious. In subsequent Atlus games that had dialogue-based demon negotiation, they've always tried harder to get the translation right, and I always feel as though something important is lost. It made the experience for me a lot more fun and immersive if these demons don't really make any sense and have distinctly alien ways of thinking and talking.
 
I think it's absolutely worth a shot going out there and emulating itPLAYING IT THROUGH PERFECTLY LEGAL MEANS. It's the sort of game where you probably will know if it's for you after the first hour or two. The whole awkward feel of it can deter a lot of people, or simply do nothing for them, so don't feel bad about yourself if it's just not your thing. Either you got a Revelations: Persona bone that this game tickles, or you don't. I think most people probably don't, but if you're still posting at this dead forum along with me, I think there may be a chance that this does something for you. Only butterflies dream about being people like us.
 

I always liked the idea but I know those games are full of classically JRPG style finickiness, so I would probably take a walkthrough with me like the trash gamer I am! I've never really gotten into playing those sorts of demanding or secretive RPGs but I absolutely love thinking about them, reading about them etc. so I'm always on the lookout for one I can actually have a real good time getting decent at.
 

Actually, you would definitely want/need to use a walkthrough for the first PSX Persona game, at least for certain bits. They pull some bullshit with a TRUE ENDING that's only accessible if you answer specific dialogue choices a certain way throughout the game, so you'll probably want to be aware of those choices going into it. The game doesn't give you any hint of this, so if you answer any of these choices wrong throughout the game, they cut the game short by a handful of hours and give you a FUCK YOU ending. My only suggestion with that is that you shouldn't EXCLUSIVELY use a walkthrough when talking with the demons. There's generally an ideal way to talk with each of them, but I think much of the game's atmosphere is lost if you miss all that wonderful incomprehensible dialogue. Beyond that, it probably is good to get a little lost in the game, since that probably would contribute to the atmosphere of it all, but I wouldn't suggest avoiding outside help to the point where you can't get through the game.
 
Other than that, I'd probably have to say this game is a great example of a finicky RPG that's still actually quite playable, so it's probably a good choice if you want something like that, or at least the best suggestion I'd be comfortable making for games like that. It's a little hard to get used to it all, and just navigating the world can be a little frustrating, but I think it's worth it. It's surprisingly literate and atmospheric for a game so rough around the edges. Or so I thought when I was in my teens playing this thing, anyway.

Today is the day where I bump a several month dead topic because I want to make sense of Persona 5. So all the spectors, ghosts, and phantoms that are still logged into this board can have something to read.
 
Persona 5 is a pretty sharp game. I have no fucking idea how this idea didn't come to anybody sooner, but it finally occurred to somebody that RPGs are generally all about just flipping through menus, so why not make the menus part of the game's thematic presentation? Virtually every menu in the game manages to be visually striking in some way. I mean, just going to the item shop and buying a bunch of curatives manages to be cool, and exciting, and provocative. It was clear that somebody sat down and really put a lot of thought into how the menus worked and felt. The voice acting helped here too, as there's parts when the shopkeep laughs at you for making a mistake in the menus, or for navigating the menus so quickly that it cuts them off, commenting on your rudeness. Ultimately, yeah, this is a somewhat superficial touch, but the menus here do as much heavy lifting as any part of the game, so they should get points for finding a different way to further the game's overall presentation.
 
The way the game plays is pretty predictably good, as Atlus has been copy/pasting what is essentially the same battle system for over ten years. It's somewhat guilty of being flashy for the sake of being flashy, but it blends well with the way the menus work, so it's hard to hold it against them. They've also gotten a little bit further away from the randomly generated dungeon nonsense that they've stuck with in the last two Persona games, which was nice to finally see. The dungeons even positively contribute to the story in this game, even if most of them do usually devolve into something somewhat mindlessly grueling at points. Most of them are in the range of being tiresomely long(particularly if you try to make it through them in one shot), and I personally think it would have helped the game out to shorten all of them in order to add an extra dungeon. But they're all responsible for some interesting moments, which is more than I can say for the last two Persona games. There is still one randomly generated dungeon(with a fucking terrible 30-second song that plays on repeat for all 70 or so floors[the ][/the]), but the game rarely forces you into it, and generally lets you crawl through it at your leisure. So while it is pretty innately tiresome, and the game does force you to make your way through all of it, you can elect to go through it in such small doses that it probably will fail to ever be a true nuisance.
 
The story is where I'm torn, though. There's some genuinely interesting stuff in the story, hamstrung by some dull, uneventful turns in the story, and a depressing amount of characters that fail to ever be particularly compelling.
 
What I think works best in the story is how the game's depiction of Tokyo, coupled with your suggested place in it, manages to tell the game's story more powerfully than the characters or cutscenes usually do. Whenever games have cities, the effort is usually made to make it interactive in some way. People know you, stuff happens there, you have the capacity to change it, some degree of interactivity. That does not really happen in Persona 5. Tokyo is static and unchanging, and it really doesn't give a shit about you. It's all populated with a near-infinite amount of formless, almost shapeless NPCs, only a fraction of which you can talk to or interact with, and even fewer can you interact with meaningfully. This, along with the almost always effective music, really can go a long way in making you feel very cold and alone when you're just out in the middle of a rainy night buying groceries and showing up to your soul-crushing convenience store job. You'll probably end up in pretty subjective territory when it comes to forming an opinion about Tokyo in the game, as they really do a rather good job of duplicating the actual real-life feel of a major metropolitan area. The words "cold" and "alone" would be two words I'd choose to best summarize my experiences just aimlessly wandering around large cities, which might be one of the reasons why I describe this game's Tokyo with such terms. I'd expect others might describe the game's portrayal of Tokyo in different terms depending on what they bring to the game themselves. It's this large, labyrinthine entity that's simply THERE, looming over everything in the game, constantly abuzz with every new stupid piece of rumor and gossip. It's neat and beautiful and horrifying and disgusting, and you could really just piece together everything going on in the story by the wonderfully inane bullshit you hear people whispering and shrieking to each other in the street. You could consider Tokyo itself one of the game's main characters, if not the true main character, and I'd argue it is the strongest designed of all of them.
 
But I went into Persona 5 excited about the individuals I'd be spending my time in the game with, particularly after playing something like Persona 4. I fucking loved Persona 4, to a point that I'm slightly embarrassed how much I liked Persona 4. None of the characters in it were all that unique, and hardly any of them are all that interesting, but they really tried to give almost everybody an interesting character arc(and very often succeeded), and they invested a remarkable amount of time in the game just trying to make an interesting dynamic between all these characters. And the game really endeavors to be about introspection, with virtually every named character in the game presented with some personal obstacle they need to overcome, some innate personality quirk or shitty way of looking at the world. I found it pretty easy to get behind a story that tried to do that, to depict these somewhat dynamic people who actively desire to be better, more functioning human beings.
 
So I went into Persona 5 with similar expectations and found myself somewhat disappointed. Fundamentally, there is an easy explanation for this: In Persona 4, the antagonist of every individual character's story is themselves, while the antagonist of every character's story in Persona 5 is almost always some other shitty person. From a purely logistical standpoint, this is going to really get in the way of interesting developmental arcs for the characters, as they themselves usually do not need to address their own faults. The blame in Persona 5 is almost always cast on somebody else, so when that somebody else is removed from the equation, everything almost magically turns out all right for that character. Not to say that character arcs don't happen, as there are a couple characters that change and become more interesting the more time you spend with them, but this overarching theme often does a disservice in leaving characters static and unchallenged.
 
Though probably more damning than this even is that the dynamic within the main game party is dull and uninteresting. They invest a genuine amount of time with them all just hanging out, chatting about various things, but it rarely manages to be fun or interesting. These people are just not particularly good company, the ice goes through the whole game entirely unbroken, and, as a result, I found it a bit difficult to really relate to these sleepy, humorless people. Probably the tone had something to do with it, as the story maintains this level of gloom the entire game that it never adequately diverts from, and that the individual problems of the characters are almost exclusively kept within their confidant story virtually forces the party dynamic to talk exclusively about the main story for 100 hours. It all just gets a bit boring after a while.
 
I blame the fucking cat. What a goddamn awful character. It's neat at first; this cute little cat that hides in your backpack and your desk at school. But the cat is arrogant, stupid, and ferociously humorless, managing never to really contribute positively to the party dynamic or anything interesting going on in the story, and its only function in the overall narrative is to be a tutorial dispenser. Most notoriously, the game elects to have the cat substitute in for interior monologue events, such as when you're too tired to go out partying in the middle of the night and the game needs to tell you when you're too tired and should go to bed. That would have been a neat idea to put in a game had this not been a game about personal liberation. The unintended end result of getting continuously bossed around by this little shit for 125 hours is that you feel imprisoned by your fucking cat, which is something that they needed to be a lot more fucking careful about, as this idea has absolutely no thematic place in a story with this kind of end goal. Regardless, the cat fucks off at various points in the story, only to return, expecting you to actually give a shit. But I did not give a shit. There's a billion cats out there that aren't going to fucking sass me and tell me when I should go to bed. I guess I couldn't help but compare Morgana's presence to Teddie's presence in Persona 4, specifically the part in Persona 4 Golden when he lives with you. Rather than just bossing you around when he moves in, or continuously pummel you with smarmy one-liners, when Teddie moves in he breaks all your shit, nurses you back to health when you get sick, leaves clumps of hair in the refrigerator, helps you dig for bugs in the garden, and very innocently attempts to have a gay encounter with you. Teddie is a goddamn party, Morgana is a fucking prison. That's why this isn't a better game. Full stop.
 
I kinda jest, as it all does work to an extent, just not quite as good as it could have. Like the game really bets the farm on their PLOT TWISTS, which I guess can be cool, but plot twists are always more interesting when they're more a matter of interesting characterization rather than a surprising turn of events. The game has some of these later on(two or three in particular), and they're so enormous that nobody is allowed to stream the game or take pictures using the playstation's integrated sharing tools. To be fair, they are actually pretty neat plot twists, almost makes the game feel like one big Mission: Impossible episode, but, for me, the most stunning plot twists are what happens when you and your idiot friends decide to call a sexy maid service, and the fact that the oppressively obedient character that does little but bother you for what felt like a fifth of the game is actually really cool once you get to know her. I think it's somewhat discouraging that Atlus was off-the-mark about this, but they were on the mark enough times that I'm probably nit-picking at this point.
 
This wasn't supposed to be so meandering. Persona 5 is a really insanely good game. I guess my beef is that it could have been THE BEST game. The thing's got a really interesting, distinct style, a tremendous soundtrack, handles well, and a good story. But the structure of these Persona games are such that they're really made or broken by their characters, and I felt as though they lost sight of that to an extent.

Accidentally stumbled onto this game Technobabylon, as it happened to be in a humble bundle with other games that I was peripherally interested in. Those other games were kinda cool, if generally forgettable, but Technobabylon was really good stuff. It's this game made in Adventure Game Studio that felt like it was made in 1998 and lost behind someone's shelf for almost twenty years. I mean that in a good way.
 
The thing doesn't really reinvent the wheel, so I guess there isn't a whole lot I could really usefully say about it beyond the fact that it's one of the best adventure games I've played in a really long time. Interesting story, clever puzzles, attractive visual style. Even the voice acting ended up growing on me, even though I found it a little bit of a deterrent at first. If there's anything negative I could say about it is that this game was probably eerily close to being genuinely remarkable; I feel like this story, with more emotional depth, could have been the kind of game that really leaves you rattled. The game's really good at sucking you into the whole scenario, which is something I find generally rare among games nowadays, but it doesn't quite sock you in the gut as much as it could have. Left slightly hanging by the end, a couple of the plot twists fell a little flat, even though I don't think this really diminished the experience. I think what's there is a genuinely good, surprisingly engaging adventure game, so we're only talking the difference between what I think is an unusually good adventure game and what could be one of the best adventure games. So I wouldn't really call that a weakness. Just kinda saying that it almost entered that territory, at least in my opinion.
 
Maybe overselling this game a bit, but I'm a sucker for well-done cyberpunk, and it's heartwarming to see well-composed indie games out there. If you're a loser like me and really dig games that take the literal story-telling seriously(dialogue and shit!!), it's one you should pick up.
 
 
 
Also I almost bought No Man's Sky today but then I googled it and discovered that this is the sort of game that I don't like. So I didn't buy it and am instead going to cut dead skin off my foot with a knife or have a good wank or read Joyce to my cat or listen to shitty 90s electronic music for several hours. Thank You.

Played Shin Megami Tensei IV: Apocalypse a couple days ago. I was going to make some huge post about it then BUT NEFARIOUS INTERNET CRIMINALS HAD OTHER IDEAS. I probably had all kinds of things to say about it when I had freshly made my way through it, but I've forgotten everything about the game.

It's an ok game, but it's pretty content looming in the shadow of SMTIV, and too low-budget to be bothered to try stepping outside of that. I don't have any issue with them doing that, since it's taking an easier approach in recycling existing prior project assets that allows Atlus to make these huge 100 hour games(see: Persona 4) that wouldn't have existed otherwise, but I don't think it got really particularly inventive with how it was reusing everything. Like you can take locations and enemies and characters and use the narrative to make them feel really dramatically different, but that didn't really happen in the game. Most of the time it felt like I was just replaying Shin Megami Tensei IV all over again with a more upbeat story. I already pretty much knew what to expect when I entered a location, and it was pretty rare that they did much to subvert those expectations.
 
What they did do to the story kinda fell more along the lines of being conceptually neat rather than practically effective. Like they recycled a bunch of the more interesting side-characters from SMTIV and kinda fleshed them out and gave them more to do, which was good, and I probably would have been more excited for the thing had I known interesting side characters from the previous game like Nozomi and Navarre played a major role in the story, though I don't think these elements were realized especially well. Navarre was the real disappointment, as they stumbled onto what should have been an exceedingly interesting character and instead just tabbed him as the comic relief and never relented. They did take the general SMT story to a more final conclusion than I felt they reached in the previous game, but I didn't feel like this made the things you're actually going around doing in the game all that more interesting. I guess my issue is that it didn't thematically feel much like an Shin Megami Tensei game, and had a texture much more akin to what they do in the Persona games. Lots of bright, cheery, generally optimistic and light-hearted characters that stood in pretty stark contrast to the horrific, miserable world they found themselves in. I guess I went into it expecting the sort of cesspool of despair that we got to see in SMTIII and IV, and was generally bummed to see happiness and comic relief characters and shit. This did serve to distance the experience pretty far from what the previous game did, but I think it kept the story or what you're physically doing from getting particularly interesting most of the time.
 
Probably approached the whole thing wrong, since I was expecting something a little more traditionally grim, and then elected against selecting all of the treat-everyone-as-shitty-as-possible choices that you kinda need to go for when playing a Shin Megami Tensei game. It's a game worth playing if you're one of those strange people who legitimately can't get enough of Atlus games, and it's got some neat moments to validate the whole experience, but I found that it lacked a lot of the shock and mystery you usually encounter with you play these sorts of games.

tho ironically Poltergeist is also a pretty noteworthy act of plagiarism. it pretty shamelessly ripped off an episode of the twilight zone. pretty obvious, bush league move by spielberg too, since he had already adapted a story by that episode's writer, richard matheson, when he made duel. NOT A GREAT WAY TO TREAT YOUR COLLABORATORS IMO

but nobody cared much because little girl lost is actually pretty boring and unstimulating, even as far as twilight zone episodes go, and got by due to a neat central concept, while poltergeist is a generally more engaging, well-told story. and word on the street is that spielberg gave matheson the twilight zone movie screenwriting gig to keep matheson from going to his house and choking the shit out of him.
 
in other news, if you're a television show watcher and haven't sat down and power-watched twilight zone for long stretches of time, you have lived an incomplete life

i thoroughly enjoyed stranger things and everything i liked about it i felt it earned on its own terms, the whole "references" thing is way way overstated

It's important to note that this label was not just applied by film critics, but quite literally confirmed by the creators themselves. This article more or less confirms that they were basically just riffing on other people's work. The interviewer frames the show as essentially an 8-hour homage and they completely embrace the classification.
 
Also stumbled onto this video that's probably worth watching: https://vimeo.com/175929311
Granted, some of those "references" are likely just coincidence and general visual cliche, but I think it's somewhat impossible at this point to call the amount of their references overstated unless you're unfamiliar with the source material. So little of what made Stranger Things work felt intrinsically theirs, it was all just vaguely re-contextualized stuff ripped out of other movies. I wouldn't have been surprised to see Richard Dreyfuss pop out of the wall, place his crack-addled head three inches from the camera, and begin talking incredibly loud and incredibly fast.
 
Though for what it's worth, I think they gain points for being so utterly honest about it. They weren't trying to make something creatively relevant, and they seem to be pretty open about that. They mainly just wanted to share their excitement of 80s science fiction movies. Mission accomplished.
 
PS I almost stopped writing after the first little mini-paragraph but I mainly wanted to post the video because I do actually really love the main theme for the show. I forgot to mention this in my big rant above, so I'm saying it here.

I do honestly wonder if it's alright or in any way beneficial to see this sort of thing, turn up your nose and think "well this is like X that already exists but not as good" or if it's just a form of dementia

I am going to go and put on my snobby hat and say that if we just roll our eyes back in our head and blindly cheer and wank on to all the remakes then you and I will both live to see the 78th Spider-Man reboot. I would categorize this as an apocalyptic event.

It might just be me but I genuinely don't see the value in watching a lesser version of something. I honestly wasn't exaggerating when I said that you could spend the 8 hours of Stranger Things instead watching Poltergeist, E.T., Close Encounters, and a bit of Silent Hill. Stranger Things admittedly doesn't have the ambition to step far enough beyond those works to really establish its own thing, and those source materials are all actually fairly strong, watchable, creative things that they're drawing from! If you can choose between going to the Louvre and seeing the Mona Lisa and taking a quick glance at a black and white postcard reproduction of the Mona Lisa with the background truncated, a sensible person should hopefully want to see the real thing. I mean, the background is the best fucking part!

But it is probably clear by now that I am a disgusting purist and I honestly only watched these things because I ran out of Werner Herzog movies to watch, so it's for others to decide how much the opinion of such a person should count for anything. My hero is a guy who spent three years pulling a 300 ton ship over a mountain because it was the right thing to do, and I'm here with the audacity to talk about futility.

i was going to post in here a couple weeks ago but i forgot. now i'm going to do this because i actually watched the entirety of two television shows, which is not something i ever do.
 
so i power-watched stranger things in one sitting a while ago because i was told that it was THOROUGHLY LIKABLE MEDIA EXPERIENCE or something. some kind of CULTURAL PHENOMENON is taking place and i don't want to be left out in the cold!! wow!!! i guess it was kinda reasonably fun, and is so powerfully inoffensive that you never really have a reason to give up on it, but there's something pretty dirty about how the show has absolutely no aspirations to tell its own story or move beyond serving as some expansive series of references of other more accomplished works. some tour-de-force of what movies the writers of the series liked in the 80s, like a several hour long tour of all the star wars action figures and steven spielberg movie posters lying around their messy adolescent bedroom. wikipedia calls the show "AESTHETICALLY INFORMED" by all kinds of more noteworthy creative talents, which is a pretty cunning euphemism for PRETTY CLOSE TO PLAGIARISM.
 
the composition usually works enough to keep your attention, and it at least has the good sense to tie all these otherwise somewhat disparate works together fairly intelligibly, but there's rarely a point where you'll find yourself watching something you haven't seen before. and you generally wish it hadn't bothered when it does try to move into more strictly original territory, as some of the subplots are fantastically uninteresting and do nothing more than contribute saggy arcs that don't make a positive contribution to the story as a whole. in truth, in the weeks that have passed since i watched it i found it unusually forgettable to the point where i don't really have a whole lot more than some broadstrokes opinion about how AESTHETICALLY INFORMED it was by films that i was better off watching instead of the program. it does that annoying thing with constant cliffhangers to keep you tuning in to the next episode, only to show that the conflict in question wasn't particularly interesting to begin with. you wait for it to get better, just interesting enough to keep watching it, and rarely do you get anything resembling a payoff.
 
i guess there are worse things to do with a dull afternoon, and if you're reading this you're probably an idiot like me and aren't going to go solve the cancer question or something, but you're fundamentally better off putting 8 hours aside to watch poltergeist, e.t., close encounters of the third kind, and a two hour marathon of silent hill. you'll literally see everything there is to see in stranger things this way.
 
 
but that's not the only thing i watched recently. i watched peep show. all nine years of it. oftentimes out of order.
 
i didn't particularly want to like this show. it's shot exclusively first person, a visual technique that never caught on outside of videogames because it's horrendous and unnecessary, and over-relies on a running interior narration, which is the most banal, overused cop out for people who don't know how the mise-en-scene works. also it's a sitcom that deals exclusively with idiotic young people and the failures of their love life, which is a recipe for complete disaster and i went into the thing expecting VINCE VAUGHN to show up with his smug shtick and proceed in making the world a demonstrably poorer place to exist. though i do think mitchell and webb are excellent creative talents, and genuinely appreciate that there are these throwback comedians in the mold of cook and moore, or the goons, out there keeping the idea of a comedy act alive, which is genuinely the only reason i gave this show a chance at all.
 
glad i gave it a chance, i absolutely loved the show. i acknowledge that i'm somewhat biased by the fact that i could probably stomach virtually anything that just lets mitchell or webb loose to do their thing, but i really think this show just works. the writing of it all is really surprisingly good, where the writers really clearly tried to come up with these somewhat extravagantly absurd scenarios, while making the sequence of events that lead to them all organic and completely believable. the characters and their performances are extremely good almost all the time, and they shuffle the cast around enough where you very rarely get too overexposed to any one character to get bored by them. a couple in particular are just wonderful characters, super hans and johnson are absolutely fantastic characters, easily two of the best i've ever seen in a television show. in general, i think the comedy of the show is pretty consistently impressive, where you get two pretty distinctly different styles of comedy coming from mitchell's hyper-anxious, unbearably british mark, and webb's ultra-slacker, wannabe-musician jez. probably the comedy works a little bit better than it should because the show doesn't just play one note constantly, but shifts between two distinct types of humor. bouncing between their two dramatically different worlds keeps it all from getting particularly boring, which is what does start to happen for episodes that don't balance the narrative strongly enough between the two characters.
 
rather than simply use the voice over monologues to explain things that the filmmakers don't feel like showing visually, they use it to really specifically further the characterization and use it as an extra dimension of the narrative, which is the RIGHT WAY to do it. they really embraced the actual visual point of view beyond just using it as a gimmick, you get to really exist as these characters in their miserable, pathetic, fucked-up lives, and the show manages to reach a level of depth in the characterization that you just don't get to see in other shows like this. it's strange but i found the show engaging in the way that i can sometimes find videogames engaging, where you get this extra level of investment in the characters and the scenarios because you're seeing it all from a more personal perspective rather than just being a fly on the wall. it's probably all just a cheap psychological trick, but experiencing these characters always saying these things TO YOU rather than just being a passive observer watching these characters say it to each other, for me, added considerably to the experience. it's one thing just watching a sitcom where the main character gets told off by some prospective lover that they've totally struck out with(*yawn*), but it has a lot more value seeing this through their eyes and hearing their completely crushed thoughts as they tear themselves apart over it. this takes what shouldn't be particularly valuable drama and makes it a whole lot more meaningful and engaging, as you get to really feel so much more of it. the characters are still all shallow and often rather repulsive, so there's a logistical limit to how engaged you can get in it all and how much you can get out of it, but the show does absolutely as much with the central style and its characters as possible. it's simple subject matter, but i think it took a pretty impressive amount of planning to coordinate the show's relationship between the visual style, the narrations, and what's physically happening in the world. that this stayed fresh, interesting, and consistent after nine seasons is something pretty creatively impressive. this was a really daunting task and i can't believe it actually worked.
 
though it's a shame that i feel like this show probably has a niche audience. i like to think it's sufficiently well-acted, well-written, and well-shot to suggest it to anybody, but i feel like the content of the show would probably be a stumbling point for people, as it often isn't intrinsically interesting stuff, or that the comedy would be uninteresting to people, or that the visual style would just deter people rather than bring them in. but i liked it, even though a large part of that is the fact that i identify a little too strongly with both the main characters and can relate to both of their spectacular failures. this is probably why i had an easier time sinking into the show's point of view, and why i was ultimately their target audience. can't say with authority that this is going to be the case for everybody, so don't come whining to me if you take my advice and watch this show and have a terrible time with it all and leave with little but a diminished amount of faith in humanity.
 
so yeah, i live in a sewer and just found out about this show in the last couple months, even though this has been a thing out there for well over a decade. i presume that this is a thing that people know about, but i guess not THAT much as i only just heard of it, and only did so accidentally after stumbling onto some of mitchell and webb's other work. i always feel like coming late to the party like this is kinda like saying WOW I FOUND OUT ABOUT THIS MOVIE CITIZEN KANE WOW WHAT A MOVIE THIS ORSON WELLES GUY IS NEAT BUT WHAT'S THE DEAL WITH HIS NOSE AM I RIGHT.
 
but whatever. the big beat manifesto is timeless.

Quote

but then they decided to not really have the fog do anything when it comes to the actual gameplay or exploration, so it's not something that will bother you as much as they narratively want it to. 

that's like the fallout 4 theme I guess. you gotta wander the wasteland and it's gonna be super scary and dangerous and there are deathclaws which are the scariest things in the world! whoops lol here's a suit of power armor and a minigun as soon as you reach the surface and now you can kill this deathclaw right here no problem haha epic d;^) have fun

eeew, you didn't take their advice though, did you? like in that first bit you sorta have to use either the power armor/minigun since you're pretty much destined to be unprepared for that fight, but the game is pretty shitty if you use the power armor at all after that. i guess i'm talking mostly about the glowing sea, really, since the game kinda half-heartedly encourages you to go through that with some power armor, but if you ignore their advice it can become a pretty honestly terrifying and effective location if someone does what i did and go into it at a lower level without a whole lot more than a hazmat suit, a sniper rifle, and a pocketful of radaway. the more i think about it, the more i think the idea of throwing all the game's options at you right there at that first deathclaw fight was actually fairly clever, as it generally gives you an early primer for how you can choose to play the game. it worked that away for me, anyway, as i saw what using the power armor all the time was like and realized that this would make for a boring experience and elected against it, though i'm sure it had the opposite effect for other people.
 
so yeah, i don't personally hold it against a game when they give you the option to make the game exponentially easier but still generally keep it strictly as an option, rather than make it this unavoidably organic thing. i remember final fantasy 8 was like that, where you could just sit there and draw magic for half an hour at a time to make the game extremely easy, OR you could just rely almost exclusively on refining the magic from items that enemies drop and give yourself a more traditionally challenging experience. it's still fundamentally an easy game, but you can elect to play it differently if that lack of challenge is less rewarding. to some degree, i think a lot of roleplaying games are like that, where you usually have the option to just power-level or overuse balance-breaking skills/weapons and remove all challenge from the game, or try keeping a better pace and actually meet some resistance along the way.
 
the overall balance of the fallout 4 experience is still pretty fucked up when you get to higher levels, and i found the SPAWN LOTS OF ENEMIES sections to usually be more annoying and cheap than scary or effective, but i think the game does give you a pretty good amount of options as far as modulating how intense you want that experience to be, and generally informing you of that. you could, of course, argue that this is a weakness in itself, and i wouldn't be inclined to really disagree. none of this shit makes the game BETTER, really, it's just that the default/suggested method of playing the game makes the game lose a lot of its edge, and playing it differently kinda restores some of what is otherwise lost there.
 
ugh, this is kind of an unpleasantly VIDEO-GAMEY post but i'm just going to roll with it rather than put all my weight on the delete button.
 

RE: stolen DS. I lived with a guy back in 2010/2011 and he had a problem with drugs and prostitutes. Didn't really bother me because he was/is a nice guy and a good friend of mine, and I never really realized how much his problems could affect me until we started getting broken into regularly. At one point during a town festival (that I was attending of course) three guys broke into the house and grabbed all kinds of shit. My work laptop, my roommate's TV, some other shit that doesn't matter, and of course my Nintendo DS case with probably 30 games stuffed inside. I fucking loved my DS, I had all the Phoenix Wrights, Hotel Dusk, the Pokemons, some random dungeon crawler, Sim City, Mortal Kombat 3, the quirky but fun Brain games, Rune Factory 4, blah blah blah I'm forgetting so many games but I still have all the cases for these games and I want to cry every time I go through them. It was kinda funny though because these asshats were on bicycles (neighbors saw them and called cops) and were trying to ride off down the road with a 50+" TV in their arms lol. So yes the Phoenix Wright games were certainly the highlight of my NDS experience, but I really enjoyed a lot of my other games. It was an incredible system with some really fun interesting unique games. Hundley it's funny that you mention that the 3DS seems like it is nothing but sequels because all I have are sequels. Pokemon, Zelda, Zelda, Zelda, Mario, Mario, Resident Evil, Phoenix Wright. I don't have a single unique game and it's kind of depressing. Maybe it's my fault for not having as much disposable income as I used to. Maybe it's the industry's fault for not taking chances. This is why PC gaming is so important, and why I enjoy indie games far far more than AAA titles. Fallout 4 has really cemented that belief now, especially since they are REALLY dragging ass with mod tools. Oblivion has been the height of my Bethesda experience but only after Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul and Mart's Monster Mod coupled with a gazillion other mods. It was a fantastic experience that no other game has been able to live up to, I must have crawled every single dungeon in that game. I probably got burnt out on the formula after that.

IMHO this is what this topic should be like more often. When we get to talking about how the drug problems of our friends have affected our video game experience. I'm not being ironic, I honestly mean this. This is the good stuff, when these dumb experiences of playing videogames have some greater context beyond firing up a console between furious wanking sessions. I just wish you had a more fulfilling story to tell than a bunch of shithead burglars on bicycles. Maybe they should have considered stealing a car first??? At least you can be content with the fact that it was entirely doubtful that their crime spree lasted long with such deplorable getaway plans. The world is not usually very forgiving of notably stupid people like that.
 
I just hope you did not have a Pink Nintendogs DS with your name scrawled on the back in magic marker, as I may have been the unwitting benefactor of your misfortune.......
 
But anyway yeah, I'm pretty sure it's not your financial situation that's blocking you from unique titles on the 3DS(though mine is bad too so idk). I truly don't know of any either, and I threw that statement out there in the hopes someone would bust in here and throw out some great title that just passed beneath my radar. I remember my brother was thinking about getting a 3DS and I STRONGLY ADVISED AGAINST THIS seeing as how they weren't any sequels he was particularly itching for on the system, which is really the only reason anybody has for buying the damn thing. Like I only got it because I NEEDED to play Shin Megami Tensei IV and the new Zero Escape game(s), but I'm still at a loss for what else to do with the thing beyond that.
 
So yeah, it is totally depressing, but I look at it more that it was miraculous that the DS ended up being as good as it was, and wasn't something anybody should have been able to sit there and honestly expect. I guess it was probably a byproduct of the interface being something fundamentally new, coupled with the fact that development costs were generally quite low for the system, that prompted even established developers to try something new with it. Just throw something new at it because what the hell is this thing??? Maybe the next time a console introduces some fundamentally different way of interacting with it we'll see these wacky ideas come out of the woodwork that just wouldn't have existed for other consoles.
 
But we'll live even if that never really happens again. As you said, that's finally started to become the status quo for PC games, so we'll probably stay busy.

I got this new Fallout 4 DLC "Far Harbor". And it's actually ok!!! Still all of the same problems with the rest of Fallout 4, but the story is a bit more interesting. The location is OK, even if there's a ton more they could have done with it. The whole location/story centers around this RADIOACTIVE FOG that fucks up the location, which could have been a really cool idea since it scares the shit out of (most) everyone who lives there, but then they decided to not really have the fog do anything when it comes to the actual gameplay or exploration, so it's not something that will bother you as much as they narratively want it to. And there's also the irresponsibly greedy price tag of $25 that should deter everyone from playing it, since it's not fundamentally that much more content than the Fallout 3/New Vegas DLCs, and nowhere close to $25 worth of good times.
 
So I guess when I say Far Harbor is "actually ok", I mainly mean that it's better than the rest of the crap in Fallout 4, but not really worth going out of your way for if you already strongly dislike the rest of the game. I only ended up with this thing because I made a tragic error in judgement and bought the season pass for Fallout 4. So a lot of my enjoyment of this comes from the fact that I got SOMETHING out of this otherwise terrible purchase that I had begun expecting to get absolutely nothing out of. But I guess I kinda wanted to like it, and met much less resistance than I did with Fallout 4, though this may be my just essentially getting acclimated to the flaws of the rest of the game, and lowering my expectations accordingly.
 
But I don't give a shit about this, I just felt like generally warning people not to dish out $25 and expect something magical out of Far Harbor. It's better than Fallout 4 I think, and it's got some pretty cool moments in there, particularly if you save-scum and play around with some of the (actually pretty cool) endings, but there are better things to spend $25 on. You can probably buy Wasteland 2 for less than that by now, which is something much closer to what everybody wants out of a game like this.
 
 
So whatever. I mainly wanted to write about this game Her Story that I played because I was in the mood to play something horrific and idiotic that I could use as fodder to make a message board post about OFFENSIVELY BAD VIDEOGAMES. I try to be a nice guy, so I'm not usually in the mood for this, but I picked up this thing for a dollar in the current humble bundle during this nauseatingly ironic mood, figuring I'd play this thing for an hour and then SCOFF LOUD ENOUGH FOR MY NEIGHBORS TO GET WORRIED THAT I HAVE SOMEONE TIED UP IN MY BASEMENT.
 
BUT I WAS WRONG ABOUT THIS GAME. It's actually extremely cool, and totally something that needs to be played by people who really dig intentive interactive fiction and don't mind a game that is like 88% cutscenes.
 
It's such a stupidly simplistic idea for a game, and I can't believe it works. You are a DETECTIVE OF SOME DESCRIPTION and you are going through clips of some person being interviewed. But you are on an extremely shitty computer with completely ineffective indexing and cannot watch the clips in the right order and are provided with entirely shitty methods of searching through the clips. And that's it, that's the entire game. You don't have to put the clips in order, you just watch the clips.
 
But the basic structure of the game is really brilliant, as your only tool for going through these clips is a limited search engine, and you end up going through the game kinda arbitrarily picking keywords and thoughts out of viewed videos, just stuff relevant to the title character and the case in question, and trying them out in the search. This may not sound like much, but it's actually a surprisingly personal way of going through it, giving you essentially the role as editor in this narrative mess of video clips, letting you follow the concepts that stick out to you. Given the jarring nature of it all, the story ultimately unfolds in your own head rather than on the screen, which is something the designer of the game should be pretty proud of accomplishing.
 
So yeah, idk. It's a dollar on Humble Bundle this week. It may intrigue others a lot less than me, but I was pretty sucked into it. There's probably the downside of knowing anything about this game, and I went into it without an especially critical eye(figured the game would shit its own pants), or any real knowledge of the game's expectations of me, so the surprise of it all was a treat and probably colored my impressions of it. AND I HAVE RUINED THAT BY TELLING YOU WHY THE GAME WORKS.
Sorry. But I think it's a surprisingly well written and acted game, which should count for something even if I've ruined some of the surprise by talking much about it.
 
 
also[spoilers]: it's strange how very few people seem to acknowledge the possibility that the main character of her story is insane. like, reading on wikipedia and reviews and such, everyone pretty confidently takes her word as fact here, even though there's absolutely as much room for her to be legally insane as there is for her story to be a factual account of her existence. this is a bummer, as i'm pretty confident that her sanity isn't something we're really supposed to be able to CONFIRM OR DENY in the game, and this enormous room for doubt in both directions makes for a substantially more interesting story.
 

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fallout 4

hundley you should give your characters +20 constitution and 4 intelligence because holy shit at your resilience with some of these corp vidcon series ... nay, dont worry, its almost admiration though, "what integrity, what willpower to dredge thru his beloved interests, this man certainly has the balls to live his life... maby u goit high wisdom as well...
 
ok well i again wanted to say stuff but i think it pr much misses the point of new vegas (im not even bringing up earlier games) but hey it's skyrim makers so i don't think it's a surprise and fruitful convo to continue further anyways?

hahahaha, i missed you man.

anyway, i am actually pretty good at staying away from just trash videogames, but the fallout series is my one weakness. and fallout 3 was generally a pretty playable game despite it being a bethesda game and all, which is why i gave 4 a shot. AND i was experiencing an EXTREME EXISTENTIAL CRISIS and LOST THE WILL TO LIVE so i pretty much just did nothing but play fallout 4 rather than face the reality of my failures in life for a short while. JUST CURL UP IN THE EMPTINESS SO MUCH THAT I FORGET ABOUT THE EMPTINESS.
 
maybe i should revise my fallout 4 review to reflect whether or not it is a good tool for dealing with the emptiness of existence
 
i will begin.....
 
Fallout 4 Is A Bad Game To Play When You Have Lost The Will To Live Because You Will Lose Your Will Further But There are So Many Places To Brainlessly Wander Around That Maybe You Will Forget About How Bad Everything Is When You Are Furiously Running Around Collecting Metals So You Can Build A Ten Story Apartment Building From Which You Can Throw Your Repulsive Fallout Four Avatar And Watch His Miserable Remains Shatter Into A Thousand Miserable Pieces. Thanks For Your Time Got Bless And Game On.
 

Quote from: Hundley on May 05, 2016, 12:25:11 am

PS I am an odd hermit, so I don't know if this game's existence is common knowledge or not, but if you really loved the hell out of Phoenix Wright, you probably owe it to yourself to try Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective. It's made by Shu Takumi and, while it's really quite different than Phoenix Wright, I think it possesses a lot of the qualities that made Phoenix Wright a compelling series of games. I actually AVOIDED PLAYING THIS GAME because it has one of the most uninteresting titles I've ever heard, but it's actually surprisingly good stuff, charming in much the same way that I thought Phoenix Wright was charming.
 
Like I said, I actually have no idea if this game's existence and ties to Phoenix Wright is common knowledge or not, so accept my apologies if I am eagerly passing forth UTTERLY VALUELESS INFORMATION. All I know is that *I* had actually heard nothing at all about this Ghost Trick game until I accidentally stumbled onto it, which is never some greater indication of whether or not anybody else knows anything about it.

 
!!! I'm pretty sure... well, i HOPE...*sweats profusely* i PRAY... that people know that game was one of the top games of our times? i spend some two days just watching the longplay of it (the guy playing it knew every puzzle and only messed up few times). fuck cave story fuck fez fuck undertale, this is the shit. it's uh a pretty left-field surprise but wasn't it like that in the old days? somebody has an vision and own way to do things, then pulls it out... unsuspecting poor sucka-kids stare at Darklands cover and make the worst decision of their lives there and then...
 
btw as a background: prior to watching the game i barely had any working experience with what kind of art or story or interaction style Shu Takumi has... i just think the game stood really well on it's own merits. very little metagaming shit or self-conscious stuff, just some really nerve-wracking, addicting episode structure...

 
you know, i kinda doubt the word on this game really got out. in general i feel like nintendo handhelds had been a somewhat niche market. i had completely ignored everything on the DS until years later when a friend of mine purchased me a cheap, clearly stolen DS from craig's list as a birthday present, and i grabbed one of those HIGHLY ILLEGAL carts to pirate games. the ds was a pink nintendogs model, the touch screen vigorously abused, the hinges unpleasantly squeaky, with a child's name written sloppily on the back in magic marker, which rubbed off on my hands exclusively at notably inopportune times. in my first few days of playing it all i could imagine was this system being RIPPED from the hands of a crying child as the burglar firmly pressed their metal boot to the child's face. so i had assumed this would be the WORST POSSIBLE GIFT, but it was slightly alarming how many really quality games ended up on the DS during that time. not even just ghost trick, there were a lot of really stellar games that i think got overlooked because people(like myself) generally saw the DS as a child's console/dumping grounds for shitty movie-games/cute nintendo crap, and figured nobody was really honestly giving a shit about the development on there. there's still a lot of total, irredeemable bullshit on there, but there's a handful of extraordinarily good games on there. very cool how wrong i ended up being about the system.
 
there was this couple year period on the DS where designers were like HEY NOBODY'S LOOKING, WE CAN MAKE GAMES ABOUT DEATH AND DESPAIR AND THEY AREN'T PAYING ENOUGH ATTENTION TO STOP US. i mean, even fucking square-enix managed to make a solid original game on the system, which isn't something that i've been able to really say since the 90s. but that generally ended with the 3DS it seems, and i believe there hasn't been a 3DS games that isn't a sequel or a remake and i would shed a tear if i had any tears left. but at least there were GOOD TIMES on the DS, which is probably more than we deserve. or at least more than i deserved, seeing as how i played all these games on a system that was probably stolen from a child still in a coma from a vicious attack from a craig's list scoundrel.

re: fallout 4, yeah. there definitely are a few scattered moments in the game that are totally okay experiences. the rest of the game is bland, but doesn't stand out for being exceptionally bad. an intelligent person could play it and not hate it. but part of the reason I hate it is because they've brought the series and all its merits to a screeching halt, and afaik people actually love it.
 
I liked some of the characters too. I think I only got around having Piper, Nick and Deacon as companions, and only Deacon after I already started to hate the game. I also thought their presence felt contrived, though. they're like isolated cinematic moments that don't fit in with what the game poses itself as being about. that's the part I where I thought they were emulating gta.

I also thought Hancock and Curie were ok too, though I hesitate to even tell you this because I don't want you to think that you're missing something that's really specifically worth launching the game to experience. It's more that this is something to do if you find the act of playing the game inescapable.
 
But yeah, even though I was able to shake some enjoyment out of what is not a very well designed game, this does leave me pretty discouraged for what the Fallout series is becoming. I think I was able to generally dismiss the whole settlements thing as potentially some isolated incident in the series, but after seeing that the focus of the DLCs thus far has EXCLUSIVELY BEEN the settlements, I'm substantially less hopeful that it was a quirk specific to Fallout 4 rather than a new direction for the series. They're really, actually serious about this apparently, which was something I was more able to give them the benefit of the doubt over before the DLCs. I'm left kinda skeptical that I'm even going to continue desiring to play the series after this unless Bethesda again outsources a Fallout spinoff game to a more reliable company.