#161
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going to play Timesplitters Future Perfect again, the only successful parody in the entire history of video games
#162
[account deactivated]
#163
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dizastar posted:

midtown madness 2


when i was growing up i had this friend who said his dad worked for microsoft and could get me any game i wanted. i asked for midtown madness 2 and every month i would ask him for a status update and he would say "my dad's busy, but he's trying". finally, after nearly a year he handed me a copy of motocross madness 2

#164
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midtown madness 2 only had two maps and they're both available from the start of the game
#165
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Dirt Rally 2.0 is really good. I said before on here that it’s only pretty good but I’m not afraid to flip-flop under extreme pressure from myself.
#166
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the amount of buff workout addicts appearing on tHE r H i z z o n E was bound to make someone other than me want to talk about racing video games. So I’ll follow up by saying Forza is still the best *collapses under deluge of thrown objects*
#167
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here's what i want to say about car driving games of whatever kind: i strongly recommend anyone who is able to play PS2 games to give Critical Velocity a go. it's a japan exclusive that has no english translation, but all the menus are in english for some reason and it's not only completely playable but i think readily understandable without knowing what any of the cutscene dialogue actually means.

it's an extremely smooth and chill semi-open world game in which you drive around a city doing missions like getting from A to B without the cops fucking you up. the stakes are low and the vibes are chill as heck, especially thanks to the smooth acid-jazzy soundtrack. it's a real good hang-out game and an interesting window into what japanese game developers thought were the important elements of GTA3 when set the task of makijg something like it (it's not really much like GTA at all)
#168
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playing this

#169
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sovnarkoman posted:

playing this



rolling STAAAAAAAAAAART

#170
[account deactivated]
#171
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dizastar posted:

on a completely different tone i started FEZ last night. its such a good game, the universe is pretty gripping and unique and i love the summer laid back atmosphere the game has. might be the best platformer ive played


there's a weird piece of history behind that game where the creators were harassed both by the industry fucking them over financially and early gamergate psychopath stalkers. no good deed unpunished

#172
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#173
Deus Ex Machinist
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#174
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dizastar posted:

another game ive been meaning to play is richard burns rally, apparently it has the best physics of all rally games and the community is still going strong with modding, maps etc 16 years after release. rally pros say they use the game to train because of how authentic the handling is.



its very good yes though I didn’t know people still played it

#175
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getting closer to the end of New Vegas and I’m beginning to see why Fuck Yeah Epic YouTube thinks it’s perfect because it is actually turning into kind of a bad video game. The dulcet tones of Rene Auberjonois will see me through, R.I.P. to this man.
#176
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apparently the standard defense of F:NV is the same as for KOTOR 2: it’s illegal to judge the shoddy work product itself because the publisher enforced a deadline, instead you must assign 5 out of 5 bags of popcorn to an idealized fantasy version that was slain at Satan’s altar by the eternal Jew. lol

I agree with Populares though, up to a point it’s videogames Tristam Shandy, it only becomes clear how truly bad it is after that part ends. Really my fault for not quitting & uninstalling at the exact moment the game did the big dumb Oblivion forced-conversation zoom-in on Benny at The Tops... never EVER lose sight of the poster’s verdict.
#177
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I suppose I should have figured it out when I tried to cross the river into “Legion territory” and found it consisted entirely of 20+ copy/pastes of the franchise’s signature murder monster awkwardly bumping into and walking over each other on a thin strip of accessible geometry to try and dissuade the player from noticing a gigantic invisible wall that permanently blocks off 1/5th of the map as it appears on the pause screen
#178
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been playing IO Interactive’s newest Hitperson games, the World of Assassination trilogy. they’re good.
#179
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kotor 2 was trash but so was the first kotor
#180
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I barely remember KOTOR but I remember feeling like I should have known better than to play KOTOR 2 or anything at all with that brand name attached even when I was young and stupid. the way I'd describe the experience of playing KOTOR 2 is that one time I had a dream that was just a trailer for an imaginary Nightmare on Elm Street sequel, where a gravelly-voice narrator explained that the new movie would finally reveal that Freddy was some innocent guy who had been accidentally exposed to "a combination of chemicals" that made him into the Freddy monster, and I was so confused and annoyed by it I woke up and couldn't get back to sleep for half an hour thinking about how the human mind could produce something like that even out of an idiot pop-culture franchise
#181
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tbh the end of every Fallout game alienates me too because I never pay any attention to the franchise-mandated dog companion or any other NPC companion beyond what's absolutely required and so I leave the dog behind whenever possible, and every ending is like "But everyone will always remember that mysterious man with the dog, who had the dog around at all times and was defined by ownership of the dog, and his faithful dog" and finishes on a picture of my character and the dog and I'm like Yup nope that is not me.
#182
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the best video game ending sequence is from Tetris, where you inevitably lose and your reward without delay is another game of Tetris
#183
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kotor s gimmick was to add some "depth" to some shitty franchise that mostly was about peddling stuff to kids and manchildren ate it up. just like what nolan did to superhero movies a few years later lol
#184
[account deactivated]
#185
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imo fallout new vegas had the potential to be a perfect game but ultimately falls short of this as benny fails to kill you in the opening scene
#186
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tears posted:

imo fallout new vegas had the potential to be a perfect game



more like joseph conrad and hannah arendt's legion... pissweak SoCal liberal humanities shit...

#187
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mfw im reading these posts
#188
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I liked fallout new Vegas... I was annoyed with the sexist attitudes expressed by Benny's gang at the casino so I was already shooting at them with my laser gun before I even realized he was there
#189
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Then I did Boon's side quest to get him to confess to war crimes, then gave him to the cannibals to eat him, before I also attacked them with my laser gun as an overly elaborate act of propaganda of the deed
#190
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Don't think just doublepost
#191
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A lot of people playing new vegas again, must be an Omen. Obsidian gets a lot of love because of their revolutionary addition to shootman games by adding in the feature of talk to man or talk to other man and get him to shootman.

Edited by Populares ()

#192
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Populares posted:

A lot of people playing new vegas again, must be an Omen. Obsidian gets a lot of love because of their revolutionary addition to shootman games by adding in the feature of talk to man or talk to other man and get him to shootman.


these features are second only to the noble tetromino

#193
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I have the day off and I’m playing the Dead Money DLC for New Vegas while I’m the only one awake, and holy shit everyone just gave up here. It’s an asshair’s width shy of parody of the main game. The writers get so frustrated you’re trying to play a video game during their Agatha Christie rip-off that they make you stop playing altogether so you can read their script. The rest of the project team takes the hint and goes on vacation.

The game is just a bad VN now. I’m not sure whether that part’s an improvement or not, though the script itself all seems to be by this one writer responsible for entire buildings full of terminal entries in New Vegas. It’s easy to recognize this person because they give nearly every character the same voice: breathless, cliche-laden, semi-grammatical run-on sentences built from three or more dependent clauses separated by commas. The Cocaine Habit Versus Deadline voice. “Went down to office today, trying to find out what’s happening, writing script where all characters sound the same, thinking I should get paid in cash lunchtime every day, complaining to payroll about it later, stitch time save nine.” I feel kind of sorry for the voice actors.

There’s a character where the writers want her to do all these complicated things, but it’s not possible for the game to make that happen. It would require more custom animation for that one character, in this one optional add-on, than for every character in the main game combined. No one was about to try to meet the insane script halfway. Instead, this fully realized 3D first-person-shooter open-world action video game just freezes itself.

Then, the video game narrates everything the writers WISH the character could do as silent paragraphs of text, a flurry of bracketed purple prose that never slows down. The character just stands in front of you making smiley and frowny faces. Meanwhile—because this isn’t a novel, so the conversation’s meant to take place entirely in whatever unsuitable first-person-shooter map location it begins—an entire page of words flies by, informing you that this character’s movements are so lively and expressive, she’s taught you how to counterfeit a specific casino’s chips out of scrap metal by pantomiming at the empty air between you. Okay.

In the plus column, the game adds one of those annoying Gollum clones that are everywhere in 2000s/2010s genre fiction, but if you select the right options in the dialog tree, it seems that you never have to spend any time with the split personality. The other personality, who refers to himself as “I” and “me” instead of talking like some ‘50s Hollywood actor in yellowface, explicitly warns you that you’re supposed to hang out with the murderous toddler-man who’s definitely going to betray you later and put up with the writers’ attempts to wring bathos from that, and warns you further that the game will become more difficult if you refuse, and damn son, he’d do it if he were you. Lol no, and Okay Again.
#194
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damoj posted:

more like joseph conrad and hannah arendt's legion... pissweak SoCal liberal humanities shit...



yeah I agree 100%. To try to make sense out of what was obviously missing I went back and read Joshua Sawyer’s essays where he explained that he wanted to portray a situation where, like, maybe the cartoon cosplay rape-slavers were the only ones equipped to deal with a breakdown in civilization and it’s like Well dude that’s a hack’s job and you still failed.

#195
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For anyone who hasn’t experienced what damoj is calling out, in Fallout New Vegas, you go visit this post-apocalyptic despot who calls himself Caesar and runs this up-and-coming military power supposedly patterned after Imperial Rome, which in the game is represented by a couple dozen 3D tents and about as many NPCs in skirts, and in front of all his top elite guys, Caesar tells you, “My story is, I was so good at going to college, I turned into king dick #1 guerilla fighter in the world, because I was the first to accept the forbidden truth that just reading books about wars makes you instantly superior at waging war. I applied my knowledge of history by telling the illiterate murder drones I met to pronounce Caesar as Kai Sar and now these dumb chumps do everything I say, but I’m also deeply conflicted at how my liberal arts degree gives me vast and incalculable power now that the shackles of Yknow, Fucking, Like, McDonald’s Happy Meals And Shit, have been cast off.”

It’s a zombie TV show without all the metaphorical gravitas conveyed by “me and my friends in the Zombie apocalypse for the epic win.” And you’re supposed to be rocked back on your heels by the moral complexity on display here, it’s supposed to make your choices in the game meaningful and memorable in some literary sense. This game’s script is near-universally acclaimed as “well-written.”

This is exactly what I mean by the generally accepted “greats” of video game writing falling so far short even of their supposed equivalents in media such as television. Most TV writing is bad just like most video game writing is bad. But “pretty good” TV writing is still nowhere near as bad as “greatest of all time” video game writing.
#196
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But he read Hegel, HEGEL!
#197
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I also shot Kaisar with my laser gun for not understanding Hegelian dialectic
#198
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speaking of josh sawyer, i played an actual good video game, icewind dale: enhanced edition. perfect for those who enjoy their real-time-with-pause combat at a minimum ratio of 50:1 paused to unpaused



#199
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party composition for the lurker-nerds I know are watching from the gallery: Bard, Fighter/Druid multi, Archer, Shadowdancer(6)->Fighter dual, Bounty Hunter, Sorcerer

Edited by tears ()

#200
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Populares posted:

But he read Hegel, HEGEL!



that part, lol