playing the new Yakuza game and noticing as always they’re remixing elements of previous characters/plots together, not sure how much they were just Yakuza movie tropes all along

is striking how they mixed the “Japan still has backwaters, y'know” of 6 with the homeless stuff from earlier to make an episode in Yokohama, the Newark of Japan, about how being Japanese isn’t any protection anymore

The new Yakuza is… a JRPG? Like with parties and job classes and battles-by-menu.

I guess if you’re trying to make like, the most Japanese vidya that makes sense

Still occasionally think about how the level designers for Parasite Eve had clearly never actually seen the American Museum of Natural History in NYC but had just-as-clearly heard it described very well

Obsessed with the notion that since Bungie reused the worldbuilding of Marathon for Halo, we’re eventually in for another remake series where the in-your-ear-gone-rampant AI is named “Joyous”

Fair, but they were only having me press square fast enough to break free of Electro to make things fun for me in the first place

atomic-lola:

Just wanted to put a plug in for one of my new fav websites, Can I Play That?, which focuses on accessbility reviews of video games by disabled gamers. As someone with a dexterity/mobility disability in my hands (carpal tunnel) I NEED games that allow easy and convenient ways to push buttons to do stuff and let me rebind keys at will. I’m now checking Can I Play That? before buying games since their reviews are ++. They include accessibility reviews for deaf/hard of hearing and cognitive disabiliies too.

Can I Play That? - For Disabled Gamers, By Disabled Gamers

Yeah one of the things about my carpal tunnel is I noticed things where you had to rapidly press a button to pump up a gauge to full were now incredibly hard or impossible, and then I started up the new Miles Morales Spider-Man yesterday and was pleasantly surprised to find their accessibility controls had an option to switch those prompts to button holds

Thinking about how the CoD/Battlefield/Medal of Honor vidya series are some of the last depictions of WWII when it was still in historical memory, during the whole “greatest generation” sendoff

Realizing that last one I played, where you, Corporal Texas and your squadmates, Privates Catholic, Jewish, and College, Sergeant Hardass and Lieutenant Patrician fight your way from Normandy to Berlin through every battle of the campaign*, assaulting a Nazi stronghold in urban combat and helping Jews in the basement escape, the one that plays up the StG 44 because assault rifles are what people expect from war – that’s it finally, fully passing into myth

* in reality the US had deep reserves and rotated units between phases of the advance – American forces being tested but unbroken and disciplined was a big part of why German forces preferred to surrender to them than the years-in-the-field and vengeful Russians

watching Cyberpunk players realize in realtime that crunch was the fix for the 1998-ass problem of “when it’s time to go to market it’s not actually done”

shieldfoss:

shieldfoss:

Let me get back on clothes:

Imagine somebody reviewing Hitman 2016 and saying they completed the game while barely interacting with the clothes or weapons systems.

That’s not the mark of shame, that’s the mark of a ruthless assassin, there’s achievements for that.

Keeping in mind that I haven’t played CP2077, imagine if you had to dress like Not A Victim when visiting gangers (visible gun, visible chrome, or a powersuit and an “I sell five guys like you before breakfast every day” attitude) or you’d get attacked on every street corner? 

You go to the posh part of town but you forgot to dress like you belong? Oof, hope you like being followed by police drones everywhere you go, hope you didn’t mean to do something nefarious!

That would make you interact with the clothing system and it would be diegetic, which every good system in an RPG should be.

Keeping in mind that I haven’t played CP2077, from hearing the reviewer talk, that’s clearly not the kind of clothing system they have.

My guess would be they probably have Bethesda fallout’s dogshit clothing system where I have to dress my character like a hobo for that +5 unarmed skill bonus you get from wearing Raider Leathers or whatever they’ve got going on. And much like it’s valid to review Fallout New Vegas without getting into the crafting system, it is also valid to review it without getting into the clothing system.

It’s not valid to review Hitman without getting into the clothing system, but Hitman is a good game, so you can’t. Sad to hear CP2077 probably isn’t.

This is the most valid opinion about clothing in RPGs you will ever read. You should reblog it to other people so they too can be exposed to the most valid opinion about clothing in RPGs.

me: ::playing AC:Valhalla:: they really capture the beauty of the muted green calm of the English countryside in summer

also me: …the drone of lawnmowers, the smack of leather on willow, has been added a NEW noise

gamers: what is this shit, we want real Fallout writing, like the old days!
real Fallout writing in the old days: ::a bunch of wacky Monty Python and Hitchhiker's Guide references::

• this is absolutely the peak of 2010s AAA
• there’s so much of it and it’s good
• you can tell they’re being “Yay Diversity” in parts but it’s not obnoxious
• a lot of it is just presenting the modern view of Vikings as well-traveled, incl. the eastern european rivers down to Constantinople
• the gay London sheriffs are well-executed
• having your merchant in Dark Ages England be Chinese is a bit much
• they’re continuing the AC:Ancient Greece thing of having your moral choices not be good/bad but pagan/christian
• kinda notable they’ve dropped that “made by a team of all faiths” disclaimer when this religionizes the deadly conflict the most yet
  

parakeet:

happy 16th birthday to the nintendo DS 🎂🎉

got one of these free as part of when I was writing manuals for THQ (If you ever played Tak: Mojo Mistake, you’re welcome… I think. I also remember a ¾ Zack and Cody Zeldalike that I see no record of, it might’ve been unfinished when THQ collapsed)

The fact that it’s not canonically set whether your character is male or female or flickering between them is a diagetic element in the AC:Vikings frame story

Thinking about how Xenosaga was a Xenogears sequel JRPG series featuring a hot eerie android battle girl and it just fell off the edge of the earth

anarcho-smarmyism:

in the new COD you can be nonbinary in the CIA and when u meet Ronald Reagan he respects your pronouns. i dont know how to process this information at all

kontextmaschine:

Are there any WWII later-Western Front strategy games where the mechanic is the US can’t really lose to the Germans, the longer you wait the more the Russians weaken them but then you get less territory in the postwar? (On the other hand, the more intense the western front is the less rewarding the territory becomes to win?)

But if you’re enough of an early threat they shift forces westward and allow the Russians to gain faster? And if (in an expansion?) you don’t support Moscow enough they pursue a separate peace and turn to backing a Chinese communist resistance against the Japanese?

jadagul:

lumsel:

jadagul:

Recurring thought when I watch blind plays of video games: you have to read the words on the screen. When characters tell you things, you should read those things and remember them. And you should read all of the words, not just like 2/3 of them.

I know my “can remember everything I’ve read over a three-hour period and keep a twelve-point to-do list in my head” privilege is probably showing here. But it always amazes me when people will kind of half-assedly skim the text, maybe even read it out loud but not pay attention to what they’re saying, and then have no idea what they’re supposed to do next.

I suspect trying to play a game while keeping a running commentary going makes it more difficult to use other parts of your brain, including the part for reading and the part for retaining information

This is fair. People who are streaming are having to juggle extra thoughts and that can make it harder to keep track of stuff.

rustingbridges

the issue is, so much of the time you really don’t have to, and it ain’t worth it

This, on the other hand, is utterly incomprehensible.  (1) Why are you playing games with a bunch of text you’re not reading?  (2) Reading and remembering text is easy and free.  Lots of puzzles are genuinely hard, but “noticing the words that were on the screen” doesn’t seem like it should be one of them.

I mean I tried the sequel LOTR Ubisoft-alike because it was free on PlayStation and it was just so clearly second-rate. Or like, 1.5th. Like not an AAA game, maybe AA.

And that included the writing and direction, I guess they think these things need a story to stitch the segments together but I ended up skipping every cutscene entirely, and then dropped into the mission if I didn’t have objective text or an arrow on screen or an obvious path to take (be it like thru a cavern or “you have a new item and a particular special object type in front of you, use one on the other”) then after like 15 sec there would probably be an audio cue of your character remembering what to do

So far my impression of Assassins Creed: Vikings is “a bit better than AC: Egypt but not as good as AC: Ancient Greece”, which given I can tell this one came from the Egypt team and it’s all at a high level anyway, okay!

transingthebourgeoisie:

I know this is very funny and all but I need you all to know that this is genuinely how this is done in the fucking speedrun