yeah uh i guess that post was again written in some kind of blur *_* looks like i will write like an idiot from now on for the rest of my life. but let's go at it!! Fighting Spirit! Hot Blooded!
 
Mother 3, I think it's just like you said - It took ages to progress anywhere in the game... The grind was unnecessary. Like there's some ridicilously neat shit (like the translation-versions cockney rats ahhah) that just gets lost in the hurdle of stupid gaming mechanics, so sometimes I get a feeling these games could benefit with the no-battles mode or super easy mode.
 
Or... sometimes I get the feeling the overall dissatisfaction with game comes from how it's really the Soap Opera - version of EB, where there is also some kind of social commentary going on but fuck it really? maybe there should had been more focus and effort in actual implementation of that stuff... sometimes EB could say (or atleast have the emotional power) a whole lot more with way less means at disposal
(like the progression of size in towns but also maybe a sense of paranoia and bad things that comes with the social issues around the towns? it's a bit far fetched but you get the idea... that you CAN do this stuff way better, where even a kid can grasp the idea... no need for Downtown Abbey dialogue - shit, there's enough of that OCD gotta-tie-all-in stuff out there in the world now).
 
Don't get me wrong, I totally loved the ridicilous hostility and difficulty at the Onett in EB... but then the encounters and mechanics sort of become a distraction, as there's not nearly enough content for rest of game post-Fourson. looks like Mother series best work as kind of an anti-game, a true multimedia project masquerading as a kids videogame.
Oh and i think EB's writing and structure is kinda good because it's occasional total disregard of audience? And occasionally fucking with expectations? I never played the game as a kid but holy shit at the title screen and the intro sequence... I was crawling up my chair on first battle encounter thinking WHAT'S WITH THE BACKGROUND?! What the *HELL* IS THAT WEIRD MUSIC (odd battle - theme)?? WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH THIS GAME!!, ahha. and sometimes there stuff like the events leading to that Moon-city (who the fuck thought this game up?!?) that can kind of have an shock impact on you... A game's gotta be good if it delays release several times & increases cartridge size each time just to only fit in MORE MUSIC (inspired of Sign O' the Times era Prince ahhah) of all things. And yeah, i like moments where you just wander off from city, and there's a guy with saxophone on sea cliffs and when you talk to him, he blasts out SNES Sounfont saxophone riff, ahahah. maybe this shit is really just an antigame? theres game mechanics, yes, but i think every mechanic was used for content or interesting shit... beating the shit out of new age hippies... YOU *TAMED* A NEW AGE HIPPIE... NEW AGE HIPPIE DROPS A "RULER"... fake battles with a middle aged hawai shirt guy who just fucks around with you...
 
I guess bottom-line is that don't we all still live in our spiritual Onett?
searching trash cans for rotten Hamburgers, strutting around lopsided downtown cautiously from corner to corner, trying to figure out who are normal friendly NPCS and who are hostile "trap" npc's... then getting our teeth kicked in bloody by child-drawing weird Western smiling hoodie chavs within seconds, while some kind of Screech Skronk Scraagh- Dub influenced scratchy, silly Rocksteady-Funk is playing in background?
Then waking up in local hospital while Ragnar's favourite SNES soundfont Dub/Ska is playing in background? really... what's. the. difference. a mirror to our times...

EDIT: nevermind, it wasn't good. on to next post.

saltwers shed their reserved cool teen husks and let loose, remembering what it's like to be a kid, enjoy things and get excited. it's no wonder Earthbound has resurfaced.....
 
I've never played Yume Nikki, Phoenix Wright, or Ghost Trick and don't have a clear idea of what they are ;'T but I did get to play Earthbound as a kid, and I will retell the story because I really like how this genuinely life-changing creation popped into my life by pure chance:
 
my mom took my sister and I along to some box department store like K-Mart and took us through the games aisle after she got her adult things. she noticed on the very bottom shelf what looked like a bright, zany cartoony kids game marked only $5 - it was a big collector's edition box of Earthbound, which contained a 'strategy guide' written like a travel book, and scratch-and-sniff cards of various enemies or items. so of course we got it, not knowing what it was at all. at the register it rang up as $50, but the clerk gave it to us for 5 because it was labeled as such.
 
playing it as a kid it certainly did change my life and the way I perceive things, mostly for the better I imagine, tho the only situation I distinctly remember is playing through Poo's training. out of nowhere, cartoony bump-on-the-head violence is replaced with visceral descriptions of bodily wounds, breaking legs and ripping off arms. my blood drained from my face and I felt a pit in my stomach. I saved the game shortly after I finished the training and I remember leaving the musty unfinished basement and going outside, noticing it was a beautiful sunny day that I was spending in a dark room playing video games. I found the sunshine, blue sky and waving trees didn't make me feel anything (suddenly ness's stoic face appears). my dad, chopping wood or something outside, noticed I was acting weird and asked me what was wrong, I'm sure I didn't say a video game. that was the second time in my life I felt that way, the first being Earth Day when I was like 6 and saw at the celebration they had a stuffed gorilla costume sitting in a lawn chair, with burn marks on its skin and chunks of fur ripped off in order to tell kids not to do drugs, or actually probably not to pollute the environment I'm just realizing
 
I did like Poo though. as a kid, he's a character you first see on the packaging and in the naming sequence, but you have to spend like years and years of playing the game before you ever get to meet him. then he's just like a quiet, reserved but talented and helpful dude. that's like what I strive to be irl.
 
edit: oh, and post-Poo earthbound has one of the most distinct endgame-feelings I've ever experienced. you've got your DX water and all these weird and kind of frightening locations it seems like the teens might appreciate more than you.
 
I didn't like Mother 3 all that much. I'm open to the possibility that it's good and it's just something I didn't notice or something concealed to me by my relationship with Earthbound that makes it great, but as an experience on its own I unfortunately did not get a lot out of it.

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.

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
 
 

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.

I never played an elder scrolls game before Skyrim. I have a dark, disgusting secret about that game which is, I did enjoy it *audience feigns surprise, pityingly obliging the expectantly grinning, impish man* it definitely had a very dumb, sensational shell to it, but I found that with the right DLC installed it was still quite possible to eek out a decent experience. I remember the DLC quests being better than anything in the main game, hitting upon various genres of horror I find somewhat under-explored in video game titles. 
 
I've thought about playing oblivion before, reading through some of the wiki pages on some of the quests and characters. I couldn't get interested in it. I think skyrim must have just come in a perfect storm of boredom, middle-of-nowhere loneliness, and lack of funds to do anything more worthwhile with my time.

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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.

eeew, you didn't take their advice though, did you?

naw. after that scene I still habitually collected power armor and left them standing around at the red rocket just in case the game ever made them necessary, which never happened before I quit playing.

I do hold it against the game, though. I really hated that scene. not so much while it was happening, at which point I figured it was just a dumb sensational cinematic event to draw in the typical video game and action movie crowd like the dragon-killing garbage in skyrim - kinda disappointing, but possibly easy to forget about and keep moving. but after playing the game for a while it became obvious that the wasteland chronically is not a scary, difficult to explore place at all, and more just somewhere u can skate around in and massacre legions of slightly-varied raiders and super mutants, for fun and for garbage supplies to build your garbage settlements and garbage weapon mods. at this point, the fact that they immediately took away one of the wasteland's only lurking fears and never bothered to establish a scraping-to-survive feeling becomes a huge problem.

I did make a habit of wandering off places you aren't led to (and as I'll cover later, have no reason to want to go to) and with one character I did make it to the glowing sea around level 5, but I eventually realized these to be entirely empty experiences as well. there is no risk-reward element. instead, whatever leveled, randomly-generated reward you manage to squeeze out of the experience will be completely glossed over by the game's "radiant" leveling bullshit. adjusting the difficulty does nothing, either. switch the game to the hardest setting and suddenly you're getting roughed up by the legions of enemies the game presents as easy (as you accurately say, cheap and annoying), doing simple tasks become even more of a chore, and worst of all there's nothing you can do to make it any better. no weapon modification, no legendary item, no combination of perks or armor or anything the game pretends is game-changing will have any difference. you're fucked. try everything you can, scrape and scrimp to try and make this game fun, but they've made it impossible.

in New Vegas, some of the best things to do were sneak through the mountains north of goodsprings and try to make a beeline for freeside (but probably get killed at numerous points along the way), wander off east of Nelson into Legion territory, naively head east of goodsprings for the first time and get torn apart by deathclaws. if you end up not being killed by the unmistakably dangerous wasteland, there is always some legitimately game-changing reward, whether it's some item or some early access to a habitable location (there are many relatively safe islands suitable for low-level characters and populated by quests, even if several of them are unfinished or underdeveloped) or induction to some faction, it actually matters. I'd like to mention briefly the view of New Vegas presented to the player on the water tower hill by goodsprings, soon after starting out. heading directly or even slightly roundabout through the center of the wasteland toward it is strictly impeded (though not impossible to traverse), making it clear to the novice player with some NPC aid which way through the landscape is a better course. enter Fallout 4, follow the edges of the map where the real baddies for some reason hang out, head toward nothing in particular, garner absolutely no meaningful reward and have nothing of interest to do once you arrive. the perpetuation of this habit into fallout 4 is like still heading to work after the apocalypse even though there's no money to be earned and the building's rubble, out of the unconscious belief that returning to old habits will restore to you what you once found enjoyable. 

so I guess in conclusion, I suppose it's not so much the presentation of an easy path, but everything else. going back to NV, even if there are better ways to go, the easy path brings with it valuable background information to players unfamiliar to the Fallout world and its own unique experience through the wasteland. F4 only reduces back to its awful, empty shell of settlement building and item modification.

I never played an elder scrolls game before Skyrim. I have a dark, disgusting secret about that game which is, I did enjoy it *audience feigns surprise, pityingly obliging the expectantly grinning, impish man* it definitely had a very dumb, sensational shell to it, but I found that with the right DLC installed it was still quite possible to eek out a decent experience. I remember the DLC quests being better than anything in the main game, hitting upon various genres of horror I find somewhat under-explored in video game titles.

I've thought about playing oblivion before, reading through some of the wiki pages on some of the quests and characters. I couldn't get interested in it. I think skyrim must have just come in a perfect storm of boredom, middle-of-nowhere loneliness, and lack of funds to do anything more worthwhile with my time.

Skyrim isn't a bad game, they learned a lot of lessons from Morrowind and Oblivion's gameplay mistakes and sans- mods or exploits it's the most playable Elder Scrolls as a result. Not as good as Morrowind once you learn how to fix all of Morrowind's gameplay problems with potions.

Skyrim isn't a bad game, they learned a lot of lessons from Morrowind and Oblivion's gameplay mistakes and sans- mods or exploits it's the most playable Elder Scrolls as a result. Not as good as Morrowind once you learn how to fix all of Morrowind's gameplay problems with potions.

Forget whatever I've said, http://enderal.com/]Enderal[/url], the sequel to Nehrim (the total conversion mod for Oblivion) just got its english translation. Worth a look even if you don't really care for unmodded Skyrim.

45 more tokens and I'll be done with the Yokai Watch crossover in Final Fantasy 14. I'm utterly sick of farming for them, but I've got Monk all the way to level 43 now. Think that's nine or ten levels since the start of the event; I wasn't paying attention.

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.

Trip report: Sunless Sea's Zubmariner expansion is really good, adds a lot of new ports to the map, especially in areas that were otherwise deserted. The new main questline, however... it's basically a heist story that ends shortly after gathering the crew.
 
Get everyone to agree to attempt to steal immortality and you're asked for a bunch of common items to enact the plan with. Provide those and you're taken to the victory message.