Sumez

I'll talk about Animal Well here when the game actually comes out physically. It's an LRG release, so I'm assuming in about two years time. It's a bit early for it now.

I feel like I've definitely seen this sprite before. Do you have a picture without the massive blur filter?

I was thinking about this game just today. Or rather, this whole school of games, and about what it is that really strikes me about them that makes me distance myself from them. Even a game like TLOU that I don't strictly mind. The story is ok, and the gameplay is alright. And both are improved in the sequel.

I thought about one thing that really defines TLOU as well as many other AAA games, and other less-than-AAA ones still targeting a similar audience - the gameplay, even when it's done well, is second fiddle.

It's not just that the game is more focused on the story and presentation, but the fact that when someone got the idea for this game, it's clearly not the game they had an idea for. They had an idea for the framework to hang it on. The setting, characters, and various story beats. What the actual game would play like is very clearly something that was thought up afterwards, based on what would fit the best into the setting.

TLOU gets away with this better than a lot of other much more generic feeling games, but I think the fact that it wasn't conceived as a video game is just something that will always feel a bit off-putting to me, a person who's really into video games.

Am I completely off about this?

Vengeful Guardian: Moonrider - Beaten 7/5

Moonrider is the sort of game that would be right up my alley. A nimble cyborg ninja samurai in a straight forward arcade-like action platformer? I loved Hagane, there is no reason I shouldn't love this.

Well, ideally Moonrider is exactly that, but ultimately it feels very similar to JoyMasher's old game, Oniken, in this sense. The exact recipe for a game that I'd swallow up, but it just isn't very well made. I thought they had really improved when they knocked it out of the park with Blazing Chrome a few years ago, but apparently that one was just a one-off.

It's hard to explain exactly why Moonrider isn't that great, but a combination of the level design, enemies and occasionally awkward moveset just means it never manages to flow that well. In order to pose a challenge rather than just being fodder, every enemy feels like it takes exactly one hit too many to kill, which will often force you to stop you in your tracks or retreat in order to deal with them.

The game has a run button, and you're generally encouraged to use it at all time, but attacking while running will also always result in a dashing attack which does extra damage, but will also both move you a considerable distance forward and, once again, stop you in your tracks. When it works well, it's fun - rewarding skillful play with a more devastating damage output. More often however, it's just annoying how easily it will send you headfirst into hazards, and/or break the flow of your progress. Especailly during boss fights, this move is just a massive annoyance, since it is rarely useful there, but the run button absolutely is.

The worst aspect of the game, however, are the two behind-the-back motorcycle stages which pretty much play themselves, demanding little of the player, and waste a ton of time on complete dead air where nothing happens.

Replaying stages without dying for a better time to get the game's S ranking can still be fairly enjoyable, as learning stages can mitigate most of the frustration from trying to deals with enemies showing up anywhere to hinder your progress. But I don't think it's enough to drag the game up from being little more than "adequate" in the context of the family of action games that it plants itself into.

I care a lot for those types of games. That doesn't make the original Sim City more enjoyable to me though.

Soul Reaver?

I really hope this is a joke post. But in that case it's really not funny.

Hopefully someone here knows where Californication lives to help them get the help they need.

Damn! 

I was convinced this guy was immortal 

Never really saw the appeal.

Wait that's not true. I absolutely saw the appeal and got enticed to try out this game many times throughout the years, there's something weirdly alluring about these sorts of games which also translates into games like The Sims, Civilization, Theme Park, Dungeon Keeper etc.

But as for the original Sim City. I don't think I ever found out what was supposed to be actually enjoyable about it and never made it very far with any one town.

5 minutes ago, Brickman said:

but it’s worth a watch if you’ve got nothing better to watch and looking to kill some time

Is this a realistic situation for anyone?  I envy those people

9 hours ago, Brickman said:

I’m actually surprised how many said they have never even heard of it.

I can understand not seeing it but this movie was pretty big at the time and I vaguely remember some people shitting on it just because they don’t like Ben Affleck which caused some controversy.

It's not like I'm not keeping up with movies. It's hard for me to find the time to watch them, but I always keep tabs on what's coming out, and I have a massive list of things I still need to see. Most of them newer than 1999 probably.

But I have literally never heard of this movie before, the title is completely new to me. I'm gonna assume it never had an international theatrical release.

Edit: seems it was shown here

3 hours ago, CMR said:

I've never played Skyrim.  Oblivion and Fallout 3 were enough to convince me not to bother.

If those don't click with you, you definitely made the right choice 

I'm interested in a few of these. Where are you shipping from?

9 hours ago, avatar! said:

I just looked, at Xbone exclusive games I would play and here is the list --

Hi-Fi Rush

It was released on PS5 earlier this year.

Same time LRG announced they were doing a physical.

I've never even heard of this one 

Lol did they just retitle NES Remix in order to sell more copies to the VGS segment?

Looks like it's working 

Shadow Man (Remastered) - Beaten 2/5

Shadow Man is a breed of games that felt ubiquitous at the time, but just aren't made anymore. It's a game that rarely gets any attention, even though I feel like it was pretty high profile back when it came out.
It's a mix of everything that was the late 90s - 3D Zelda-slash-Tomb Raider style exploration with plenty of platforming and a collectathon structure that gives you access to new areas when you find and collect certain numbers of macguffins. Spice things up with an edgy demon/voodoo/world of the dead theme, and a synth-heavy industrial horror soundtrack, and you got 1999 in a nutshell.

I'll be honest, the game doesn't give a good first impression. Awkwardly animated cutscenes that dump a ton of complex lore on you, but give you no idea about what is going on. Areas are bleak and repetitive, and hard to find your way in. Enemies barely telegraph attacks, and even taking a hit gives you little to no feedback. The controls feel familiar, but are off in various ways that are bound to throw you off ever so often all the way until the end. And the combat in general is really just plain garbage.

But give the game a chance, and you'll eventually get dragged into the bizarre worldbuilding, and the complete maze-like stage layout. For every few steps forward, you'll run into new branching paths, and for every path you explore, new branches continue to show up, making it incredibly hard to even keep track of what options you have explored, and where you are even headed. Every stage will open shortcuts and wrap around on itself like a really solid Soulslike map, feeling like a complete mystery until you're done surveying every corner.
Upgrades are frequently required to explore specific areas of one map, although often it is not clear what you need until you have it, and the game will not shy from sending you really far into any one area before realising you can do nothing here yet and have to come back later. And it's not like it outright tells you that either, you'll just have to make that conclusion yourself (or go back and ask the game's single helpful NPC).

But it actually works, and never feels frustrating, mostly due to the idea of the game's main collectible, amusingly literally called Dark Souls, caps and all.
Like Mario's stars or Jiggies in Banjo-Kazooie, these artifacts, once enough have been collected, allow the Shadow Man to open various gates placed throughout the entirety of the game's massive interconnected world. And you better remember where they are located, because you don't get much of a map to rely on either. So no matter where you go, or what dead ends you end up in, you'll always gradually get closer to opening the next major gate.
There is a LOT of backtracking in this game, but every time you go back to an area you'll likely discover brand new places or ways to get around, so throughout my entire playthrough that never felt tedious at all - instead it feels incredibly rewarding finally being able to reach and collect that Dark Soul you spotted five hours earlier!

Complimenting this is a cool tome that you find quite early on in the game, containing a bunch of cryptic texts and crude drawings, most of which seem ritualistic, and make little sense with the modicum of information you have at that time. But inspecting it later on, you'll likely spot bits of information that suddenly make more sense to you, and help informing you about mechanics that otherwise seemed obscure. 
It's not quite on the level of the pages that you find throughout Tunic, but the experience is not dissimilar, and it's a cool gimmick that I wish more exploration-focused games would attempt.

Although the majority of the game takes places in the world of the dead, you'll occasionally travel to the real world to combat a group of serial killers, the game's five major bosses. They have a really weird dynamic, because there's a whole mechanic in place, where the protagonist is unable to turn into Shadow Man during the daytime, and therefore has less powers while there. But these areas also feature very little combat in the first place, and once you figure out you can't complete them in this state, you probably won't go into any of the others until that plot point has been solved, rendering the whole day/night issue irrelevant.

The real world areas are very tonally distinct from both eachother and from the rest of the game, and offer a really cool chance of pace. But personally, due to the circumstances described above, I ended up just doing all of these at the tail end of the game, and I imagine that's how most people play it. On one hand, it would have been better off if you're enticed to actually do these sporadically throughout, but at the same time I also really appreciate the highly nonlinear structure of the game.

SRG are selling their remaining copies of Inscryption on eBay. Just thought you guys would like to know

7 hours ago, TDIRunner said:

But MUCH MORE IMPORTANTLY, they have also announced that the HD remaster for TR I-III is also coming to LRG.  That is amazing news.  Now they just need to announce a physical version of the Dark Forces remaster.

I'm up for this! Also announced is Animal Well, the first game from Big Mode. And I'm really hoping for news on Hi-Fi Rush some time soon. Hopefully it didn't get canceled after Microsoft shut down Tango.

Agreed with most of that on Tunic, and I said some of the same things a few pages back on my own writeup. It's a game that does (at least) two widely different things. It does both of them really well so it's hard to criticize it for it, but I do wish it was more focused in its design.

11 hours ago, Floating Platforms said:

Man, with this game, my brain always feels like it's failing me. Amazing how you can feel temporarily smart when you figure something out only to learn it opens a single room and not the next area.

Have you started taking notes yet? I really recommend getting pen and paper out for anything that looks suspicious

Haha yeah I'd say influence is definitely a matter in importance, i just think if what you influenced was a massively successful predatory business model, it's probably not very important to anyone outside of the few people who made a lot of money on that 

14 hours ago, Tulpa said:

Candy Crush is unimportant to most of us here in and of itself, but objectively, it did influence mobile games and beyond to some degree. In that sense, it is objectively important. 

Well I disagree I don't think something being influential says anything about its importance. In that case, wouldn't you just be asking "what is the most influential game"?

what I think is important is definitely also not the same as it being my favorite