Mood of the day:

fake holidays made up for online game worlds to mirror Halloween/Christmas/Golden Week/etc.

gamer-of-the-day:

Today’s Gamer of the Day is: The weapons dealer at my local flea market

I just realized how much no sense the perpendicular hilt on that Halo energy sword makes, how do you even get leverage on that? Do the Covenant species have differently constructed wrists? At least the bat’leth kind of works as a pointy bo stick.

Update, looking up the lore:

The Sangheili are also very strict on who can be trained in the art of swordsmanship - only aristocrats are permitted to wield Energy Swords, and sword wielders are no longer eligible for marriage. Breeding with any female they choose is permitted, married or otherwise, to ensure successful transmission of “swordsman” genes.

Huh

I grok that

also re:RDR2

It’s not a lie the horse mechanics suck

In the last year I’ve played 2 games from off-brand Eastern European devs (Witcher III and Kingdom Come) with better horse mechanics

I get you love your engine’s authentic kinetics

Which is why GTA 4 cars were abominably terrible and unfun until they loosened it up in 5 (and gave you Franklin’s slow-time ability)

(Not that they’d consider taking it back to the fun they made their brand name on, the measured and awarded 7x flips of GTA3, that was vulgar stuff best left to the Saints Row franchise now)

But if you’re going to hack it “horses have enough horse sense not to run smack into trees and boulders” is accurate! And you’ve already worked horse sense into it since RDR1 with the “horses rear rather than running off a damn cliff” mechanic

me: wow these frustrating RDR2 hunting request missions basically require me to learn to recognize bird species by their songs, and thus creates a more visceral sense of earned outdoorsmanship than I expected

also me: it’s great how you’re putting your desire for self-betterment and appreciation for nature in service of making the numbers on your vidya go up!

me: setting aside that real-life birdwatching spawn rates are too low to provide this reinforcing feedback, if as many Americans who are having this vidya experience actually did it tomorrow we’d clear the skies in a week, this questline is why the MBTA

this reminds me of Mad Dog McCree

and it’s funnier than Saturday Night Live these days

(I miss Mad TV)

“‘Environmental storytelling’ just means skeletons on toilets, and teddy bears next to drugs and a gun”

Like ok that’s specifically the Fallout 3 aesthetic and yeah it wore thin

But consider that making the gameplay need to provide lootable items work with the artistic drive to evoke an atmosphere or narrative at all was a step forward

Compare with how before they were in tension like the classic JRPG gripe “why is the beloved chosen hero walking into your house and stealing stuff from your drawers”

Or at best disconnected, healing items in practical medicine cabinets or as non sequiturs, the arbitrary wooden item-bearing crates that inspired the 2000 “Time To Crate” metric

kontextmaschine:

Finished the main arc of Red Dead Redemption 2.

It’s the best-written story I’ve played as a game, the epic tragedy of America and masculinity that Rockstar was trying for with GTA 4 and V

So much so that when you step back you realize the story missions aren’t much from a gameplay perspective - you repeatedly ride horses while having a conversation, watch a cutscene or do a one-off button press mechanic to do something, then an unchallenging fight where you either fire at a wave of attackers from cover or ride away firing at the ones chasing you

There’s enough novelty in the stranger missions and hunting and challenges to keep you entertained though

In plotting it keeps up the GTA V mechanism of being oriented around a few major heists, but there are parts where it seems to be aping RDR1’s beats in an almost Star Wars sequel fashion. This far into the last one we had an escapade with Mexican rebels? So this time we’ll have an escapade with Cuban rebels! Last one ended with John Marston doing odd ranching jobs? Well

Wrote this and hopped in the shower I was like “wait, are you saying RDR2 is a walking simulator?”

And like… lots of walking and talking, strong character-driven story, beautifully detailed environments, thin quicktime event-heavy gameplay as a frame on which to hang dialogue? Maybe not wrong?

Like, thinking of comparables, MGSV:Phantom Pain was all in service of Kojima’s narrative and themes, but the gameplay mechanics were a lot more central to advancing through it. And there is the Rockstar precedent of L.A. Noire, where they took their GTA engine and built this polished model of late-40s Los Angeles and its pathologies and then had to be pressed to add driving and shooting mechanics

Finished the main arc of Red Dead Redemption 2.

It’s the best-written story I’ve played as a game, the epic tragedy of America and masculinity that Rockstar was trying for with GTA 4 and V

So much so that when you step back you realize the story missions aren’t much from a gameplay perspective - you repeatedly ride horses while having a conversation, watch a cutscene or do a one-off button press mechanic to do something, then an unchallenging fight where you either fire at a wave of attackers from cover or ride away firing at the ones chasing you

There’s enough novelty in the stranger missions and hunting and challenges to keep you entertained though

In plotting it keeps up the GTA V mechanism of being oriented around a few major heists, but there are parts where it seems to be aping RDR1’s beats in an almost Star Wars sequel fashion. This far into the last one we had an escapade with Mexican rebels? So this time we’ll have an escapade with Cuban rebels! Last one ended with John Marston doing odd ranching jobs? Well

kontextmaschine:

Red Dead Redemption 2 has been such a polished jewel of what AAA open-world narratives can be, but just now there’s this adult-female-as-young-male casting (for young Jack Marston, the post-epilogue PC of RDR1) — a classic voice acting scenario — somehow done more infuriatingly bad than old Capcom “maybe you, the master of unlocking” lines with no direction at all

this was the fishing mission, for a bit after this I was like “you know, RDR1 had that the awkward subtext about John and Abigail was how they were committed to this domestic thing after back in the day every guy in the gang had a turn”

and they weren’t even touching on that so I was like “huh are they retconning it” but then there was the “introduce sniper rifles” mission and in a passing ride-to conversation Albert (this game’s PC) ripped John up over it in a way that was kind of a critique of him as a protagonist that then immediately got flipped around in a way that like

• presented self-awareness at the narrative level

• and meta-narrative

• and how they tied into 2010 and 2018 narratives of masculinity

• while throwing a series lore screwball?

• in like 6 lines

Man I missed Rockstar, you could tell they were like 2/3 done GTAV when they had to rush it before their target console generation expired

(even then, they delivered Did Somebody Say Yoga?)

In a barcade projecting a Castlevania III playthrough on the wall and it’s really impressive how advanced these graphics are for NES, it’s close to early Genesis really - some detailed backgrounds, complicated palettes, a “screen shake” where all the terrain seemed to vibrate while sprites held steady, a floating multi-segment bone snake moving in circles (which was a classic arcade “see what we can do” of the period)

It’s a funny example of long-term drift in established properties that Assassin’s Creed at this point mostly ignores the Abstergo/ancient aliens frame story, is barely about the Assassin/Templar rivalry or even climbing tall buildings anymore, and is increasingly focused on naval warfare simulation

Playing the new Spider-man game, it’s really good, some of the best looks of this console generation (even on a non-Pro PS4), also the best cutscene/voice acting and directing and best writing in a AAA game

It’s true it really is uncomplicatedly pro-cop anti-criminal/prisoner in a way that clashes with modern bluecheck culture but makes sense for a property about heroism and duty for 8-year olds

The lineage clearly comes from Batman:Arkham (which I think adapted its combat system from one of the Assassin’s Creeds) but also the last, meta-wacky Saints’ Row and Infamous: Second Son? Like, I saw the familiarity with the wall running animation but wrote it off, but then the earthquake drop from height, and the authoritarian mercenary-cops in that particular white ceramic body armor style setting up checkpoints, the quadcopter drones, the way the protag fires light projectiles from the hands…

I’ve started to notice a lot of this duplication in AAA games, dunno if it’s the same creative directors rotating around or taking inspiration from the same sources or what.

Swear I’ve seen the same “floating unearthly Egyptian-themed structures covered in Borg kibble”, “this one set of terraced blue salt-drying pools on a white hillside”, and “drainage on medieval dirt streets through a grooved wooden plank down the middle” in multiple games each this year out of nowhere

Also, it’s interesting with the decline of the GTA series the main mode of transport in these games has gone from cars to vertical climbing/flying(/Just Cause parasailing)

And to return to this particular game, dat design whereby even Avengers Tower has big utilitarian HVAC units hidden out of view on its rooftops tho

swampgallows:

when your roll for feminism lands on 1 and becomes a femdom quest

Destiny 2 free on PlayStation this month, so dicking around

It’s Halo campaign mode as Diablo, dunno who was asking for that

(Borderlands, in contrast, was World of Warcraft as Smash TV, that’s totally reasonable)

I know Bungie likes to reuse thematic and visual elements – several Halo weapon models have been getting steadily more hi-res each release since 1994’s Marathon, and there’ll inevitably be a trilogy where your AI companion Joyeux goes rampant in the end – but jeez it gets a little tiresome

One of the races that had a distinct design was the Hive, the one that thematically took the place of Halo’s Flood, but even then they managed to simultaneously invoke several vidya alien enemies - Doom’s imps, Metroid’s Chozo, even Area 51’s aliens and… oh, get close and they’ve got Pfhor tri-eyes from Marathon

kontextmaschine:

kontextmaschine:

Assassin’s Creed: This work of fiction was designed, developed, and produced by a multicultural team of various religious faiths and beliefs

Also Assassin’s Creed: lol no one’s gonna terrorism us for blaspheming against the Egyptians, you fight all those wacky animal-head gods as endgame bosses to collect the elite Anubis gear set

I will say Origins really dropped the ball on the serious revisionism they’d been doing, like 3 was “Ben Franklin was a dirty old man and George Washington was an incompetent self-dealing genocidaire who stumbled into something good”, Black Flag/Rogue/the mobile slavery one were “the entire settlement of the Americas was bad guys”, Unity/Syndicate were like “capitalist democracy happened because it became an easier and more comprehensive way for the strong to dominate the weak than feudalism, also the anarchistic freedom this series always idealized is a juvenile ideology counterproductive on its own terms”

Origins was like “pre-capitalist Egyptian society and economy was completely organized around temples run by mostly-hereditary priests who controlled the distribution of goods and prestige under severe tensions and pressures and sometimes they became corrupted towards self-interest on an individual basis, which meant they might be selfishly blasphemous”

I mean like the apex of this was a mission sequence like “a priest of Sobek (the crocodile god) is killing crocodiles to use them as mummies to smuggle opium”

(like that 80s Chipmunks balloon movie!)

And it’s interesting to see Bayek, the sympathetic protagonist, get murderously angry at blasphemy that means nothing to us

But without that I think it expects us to have residual anger at illegal opiate dealers that doesn’t work when they exhaustively exhibited how opium is a normal crop and law, taxes, trade, and death mean completely different things in this world

kontextmaschine:

Assassin’s Creed: This work of fiction was designed, developed, and produced by a multicultural team of various religious faiths and beliefs

Also Assassin’s Creed: lol no one’s gonna terrorism us for blaspheming against the Egyptians, you fight all those wacky animal-head gods as endgame bosses to collect the elite Anubis gear set

I will say Origins really dropped the ball on the serious revisionism they’d been doing, like 3 was “Ben Franklin was a dirty old man and George Washington was an incompetent self-dealing genocidaire who stumbled into something good”, Black Flag/Rogue/the mobile slavery one were “the entire settlement of the Americas was bad guys”, Unity/Syndicate were like “capitalist democracy happened because it became an easier and more comprehensive way for the strong to dominate the weak than feudalism, also the anarchistic freedom this series always idealized is a juvenile ideology counterproductive on its own terms”

Origins was like “pre-capitalist Egyptian society and economy was completely organized around temples run by mostly-hereditary priests who controlled the distribution of goods and prestige under severe tensions and pressures and sometimes they became corrupted towards self-interest on an individual basis, which meant they might be selfishly blasphemous”

Assassin’s Creed: This work of fiction was designed, developed, and produced by a multicultural team of various religious faiths and beliefs

Also Assassin’s Creed: lol no one’s gonna terrorism us for blaspheming against the Egyptians, you fight all those wacky animal-head gods as endgame bosses to collect the elite Anubis gear set

talkinggorillabutler:

kontextmaschine:

In retrospect a big part of the wonder of the ‘90s was that even trivial vidya entertainments would be, like, part of a competition between Peter Molyneux and Will Wright and Richard Garriott and Sid Meier to create the most accurate simulation of the entire world according to their own personal theories of the underlying metaphysics

The audience is supposed to fill in that at the same time the ecologists (Kyoto Protocol), economists (early HFT), and politicians (Karl Rove’s cutting edge get-out-the-vote-but-on-a-computer efforts of 2000-2004) were also doing world simulations according to their own personal idioms.

that’s not at all what I’m thinking of, I’m thinking about how they did games about the Gaia hypothesis and gestalt psychology and metamythology and New Urbanism in the 80s-mid 90s (SMAC in ‘99, Black & White ‘01 at the latest)

In retrospect a big part of the wonder of the ‘90s was that even trivial vidya entertainments would be, like, part of a competition between Peter Molyneux and Will Wright and Richard Garriott and Sid Meier to create the most accurate simulation of the entire world according to their own personal theories of the underlying metaphysics