my thoughts on 3 games, deliberately ignoring the stupid amount of hype or hate surrounding each on them on the blogosphere and twitterverse. despite never hearing much about this garbage on my own, I've always felt the need to reference the crowd opinion in order to get the Full Scope before I weigh in and it's all really dumb and boring!!! I'm exhausted -


Fez is a solid game. it picks the fairly appealing concept of a 2D world discovering a mythological 3rd dimension, and extensively develops it in a pretty fun way. it's effective, and actually kind of refreshing, to see how fez effortlessly extends this concept to these relic game interfaces (world map, inventory, title screen), taken as artifacts from the vintage period of gaming it's referencing. the game also sorta creates a certain logic that the player involuntarily adopts. I don't exactly find it earth-shattering though, and while the game does create some rather pretty environments and decent puzzles out of this cubescape, I feel it fizzles out before achieving anything really satisfying. I found it kind of bland when I finally decided to set it down, but looking back I still found it to be a pretty fun, reflective video game to play on your nintendo.



Amnesia: a Machine for Pigs is pretty good. when I played the first Amnesia I didn't know anything about the game and I wasn't a horror fan at all, but I ended up loving it. I found the game to be a gripping experience with a surprisingly effective milieu. this game, dev'd by the same crew as Dear Esther, is a lot different. for the most part it's not very scary, rather unsettling. the story is a lot stronger and more prominent. I've always been pretty invested the theme it follows so I was gonna enjoy it no matter what, but it could have been delivered much more effectively. probably the biggest failure of the game is how it's frequently interrupted by the PC's journal, which is a vital part of understanding the story, but really takes the player out of the game and hampers progress towards achieving the engrossing sort of environment that the first Amnesia so effortlessly established. replay would bring more clarity to the experience, only the lack of puzzles and unpredictable events makes the trek back through the machine tedious. I think it was an excellent idea to scrape away all of the relic video game mechanics and think about what's really necessary to convey this sort of experience though, and I think the result is still worthwhile.



Bear Stearns Bravo is pretty good, and playable here. it faithfully recreates those old live action video adventures in a pretty entertaining and occasionally funny way. the game parodies the events leading up to the 2008 financial crisis in a dystopian alternate reality where everything is about market shares and mortgages and celebrity bankers with stock tickers attached to their heads. each of the (currently) two videos has a surprisingly large world locked away inside them, and it's pretty fun to dig around and find out what new things you can see just by choosing different options. for a video game, I really dig the characters and the experience of interacting with different people. I hope they expand it even further.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Du14xgVS7PE

D2 makes grinding look like cake.

finished persona 4
 
went into it really expecting not to care for it very much - sometimes i wonder if i get more enjoyment disliking games than having a worthwhile experience with them - but i really liked this game. liked it to the point where i'm rather ashamed how much i liked it.
 
this game doesn't really do that many things right. the music lacks specificity and is handcuffed to unnecessary and often obnoxious vocals(shoji meguro is better than this, there was only ONE song I unequivocally enjoyed and it appeared 100 hours into my playthrough); the contrast between the grinding nature of the battle design and the overly-involved story approach crippled countless opportunities to make both the game's combat and story more interesting as neither fed off each other; the story repeatedly hits its head on its low characterization ceiling, as the majority of the game's characters are just rehashes of the same slop we've seen over and over, nothing much new and rarely something that feels genuinely original(though, to be fair, i thought naoto and kanji were both reasonably unique and interesting, teddie was ok in theory, but that's about it); you spend damn near fifty hours in the game wandering aimlessly around town eating beef, fishing, and hanging out with your horrendous friend yosuke, all to the tune of about eight different maps; you spend the entire game searching for the mysterious killer but the game offers so few legitimate possibilities of who it might be that i was able to correctly identify who it was about 35 hours into my 115 hours in the game, if only for lack of any other feasible alternatives, which is a fantastically short-sighted mistake for a story like this to make; and, most importantly i think, the way the game handled gender and sexuality was at times so off-putting that i nearly quit the game entirely. i could go on, this is just off the top of my head.
 
and yet, none of that really mattered, it all works. as i said, none of the characters are really that unique, and very few are complicated to the point where you'd need more than a brief scene to explain everything there is to know about them, but the game goes into such impressive depth with all of them, lets you see every possible thing about them from every possible angle, that it makes them all feel a lot more real and makes the experience of just hanging out with these people a lot more engaging. the writing and translation was actually rather good too, particularly considering what they had to work with. the whole game's story is completely conversational, never just a process of you getting fed mundane game instruction, which is just something you don't see enough of in games. there's a system behind it all, be nice to people and help them confront how disgusting they are in order to more effectively murder monsters later, but rather than just dismiss this part of the game as a fetch quest, do nothing more than feed you some system text about how great you are and how far your numbers have gone up, the writers really devoted serious energy into making most of those interactions fairly genuine and sincere, crafted stories out of them all that were compelling. rarely is it that any of them are that fantastically interesting, but none of them are bullshit either, they deal with real problems, complex stuff that actual people go through. it was an odd way to reach the destination, but it was a nice excuse to see these sorts of story elements in games, seeing characters say things that you've never heard in a game before. often the drama of it all doesn't work, just some mute main character staring blankly at someone crying, but i found it pretty easy to get involved in what the game was trying to do most of the time, which is probably saying a lot given how awful and jaded i am(ps if you don't know me i am awful and jaded).
 
persona 4 establishes such a remarkably vivid context for what you're doing, much moreso than most newer games i've played in recent memory. it's a shame linear story based games like this have fallen a bit out of favor recently, and when you do see them the creators just don't have their shit together. i'm a sucker for these sorts of games when they work.

Found a site that emulates Apple II computers so I've been playing Ali Baba for the first time in about twenty years. http://www.virtualapple.org/alibabadisk.html
 
I linked a few pics of text in the dump topic; the game reminds me of these forums for some reason. Mostly the ducats and Dwarves.
 

Bear Stearns Bravo is pretty good, and playable here. it faithfully recreates those old live action video adventures in a pretty entertaining and occasionally funny way. the game parodies the events leading up to the 2008 financial crisis in a dystopian alternate reality where everything is about market shares and mortgages and celebrity bankers with stock tickers attached to their heads. each of the (currently) two videos has a surprisingly large world locked away inside them, and it's pretty fun to dig around and find out what new things you can see just by choosing different options. for a video game, I really dig the characters and the experience of interacting with different people. I hope they expand it even further.
 

Come back horse_ebooks! 
 

Found a site that emulates Apple II computers so I've been playing Ali Baba for the first time in about twenty years. http://www.virtualapple.org/alibabadisk.html
 
I linked a few pics of text in the dump topic; the game reminds me of these forums for some reason. Mostly the ducats and Dwarves.
 

Quote from: Tiny's First Pepsi on October 05, 2013, 04:49:38 am

Bear Stearns Bravo is pretty good, and playable here. it faithfully recreates those old live action video adventures in a pretty entertaining and occasionally funny way. the game parodies the events leading up to the 2008 financial crisis in a dystopian alternate reality where everything is about market shares and mortgages and celebrity bankers with stock tickers attached to their heads. each of the (currently) two videos has a surprisingly large world locked away inside them, and it's pretty fun to dig around and find out what new things you can see just by choosing different options. for a video game, I really dig the characters and the experience of interacting with different people. I hope they expand it even further.
 

Come back horse_ebooks!  ​

 
Horse_ebooks was a fake spam bot that happens not to be a spam bot. Pull yourself together maggot.

i'm working my way throuh saints row four at the moment.   I'm not really sure why - it makes me feel dumber everytime I beat story-related quest.

Its been a long time since I've played through either game(actually, those two are the only FO games I've beaten... FO3 can suck it, but i do want to finish 1 and NV some time), but to the best of my recollection, there are no real spoilers in FO:T about FO2. That said I'd still suggest playing FO2 first, just because Tactics has the better battle system(mostly in that you actually control all your party members) and going back to FO2 might be annoying. Also, keep in mind FO:T is pretty much all about the battles, with all the dialog and such taking a back seat(they even removed a few dialog skills so they could add driving or something).

I have FO: Tactics, I got it in a bundle, I've heard its semi-canon (urgh) and that it came out after FO2 but its story takes place before FO2. I know the stories don't connect much but I feel like I should play all the games in story chronological order not release order because I'm nuts. Otherwise Tactics is a waste and I'm likely to never play it. Regardless of whether you think Tactics is a good game (I'll figure that out on my own) do you think that by playing it first that I'd ruin any aspect of FO2? because it came out later I can see it 'spoiling' things for FO2 even though its set at a time long before canon-wise. Any assistance here is appreciated!

You can really get away with skipping Tactics entirely to be perfectly honest. I tried playing it a bunch of times, and it's kinda neat, not an awful game or anything, it's just barely a fallout game and not something I think really anybody truly considers part of the fallout experience. Every time I seriously sat down trying to play it I eventually just gave up entirely, as there's really no story to speak of, short of R. Lee Ermey screaming at you once in a while, and the fallout battle system gets fairly tiresome when that's all you're doing in the game. It's still worth trying one day I guess, it might do more for you than it did for me, but it's absolutely not something you play instead of Fallout 2, for fear of you just losing steam in the series entirely and never getting around to Fallout 2.

I've never played Fallout 1 or 2 but have played Tactics extensively. I never managed to complete it as the difficulty becomes insane once you start encountering robots. I do love it in the respect that it is all I have known from the isometric incarnation of the series. I wasn't allowed to play PC games until I was about 13/14 years old and grew up with a beige Macintosh LC (which admittedly played a mean game of Command and Conquer, and Macworld Shareware) so I never got into it. I tried to start a game of Fallout after downloading it from GoG but couldn't get the controls to work. It's as if I am destined to never play it.
 
I found Tactics to be really great fun so going on what you say I really need to get my shit together.

I found Tactics to be really great fun so going on what you say I really need to get my shit together.

Yeah, probably, although the first two Fallout games aren't really all that combat-oriented if that's what you liked about Tactics. It's there, and it's done reasonably well most of the time, but they're definitely more about story and atmosphere. It's still pretty good stuff I think, something pretty much everybody into games should at least try, but you're coming into those games from a really unusual direction!

Actually if you are crazy about Fallout Tactics you may also want to try Jagged Alliance 2 if you haven't played it. Setting and atmosphere aside, Fallout Tactics is probably a lot more similar to Jagged Alliance 2 than anything else in the Fallout series. ***themoreyouknow***

I don't think Tactics is a prequel. As I said before, my memory is fuzzy, and I guess it does make sense that the beginning of Tactics story takes place before FO2, but they are so loosely related, its hard to really consider it a prequel, or even a sequel. Its just a game that happens to take place in the same world I guess(and has probably been ignored in the greater continuity of the series).