Figured I'd try to get a general discussion thread going on this comm. If there's interest I'll make a new thread every now and then.
I've been going through the Ratchet and Clank series on PS2 and am just starting up Going Commando. Emulating everything on PCSX2 (ask me about emulation for anything ever and I'll be glad to help you) which has been a really great experience so far. This franchise has lots of nostalgia for me and represents the best of the PS2-era platformers (although I did love both Sly and Jak). I think the reason I've always like the R&C series more than Jak is that the weapons were more creative/fun to use than those in Jak 2 onwards.
I'm thinking about trying out the System Shock Remake this weekend but never played the original. I'm aware it's a much older design-style of game but it looks like something I could really enjoy.
I'm back on my bullshit of playing NWN 1 as a Druid. Game is hard and kind of a slog at parts, or maybe I suck at games that aren't JRPGs? WHO KNOWS.
It's been ages since I thought about DnD 3.5 or NWN1 specifically, but I feel like divine spellcasters were pretty strong in it. Are you generously using buffs? No shame in dialing down the difficulty if it stops being fun!
Also, the main story is kinda ehhh. The expansions are pretty great, though.
Yeah I've been putting it on easy for the tougher fights, but I feel like a wimp lol.
Keep in mind that it was more designed as a multiplayer thing (especially when you compare it to Baldur's Gate). You get, like, one computer-controlled companion instead of a party of 6 that you can manage by hand.
Sadly I have a pirated GoG copy so I can't connect to any servers, tried it but my key is in use and I dunno how to get another one. But yeah I see how this game was made with multiplayer in mind.
I'm assuming the online is mostly dead, so you're not missing much. When it originally released there were lots of small persistent world servers that people would play on - pretty fun, but practically impossible to recreate today.
I distinctly remember griefing on a Harry Potter RP server with a half-orc monk :ok:
Edit: NWN2 has fantastic expansions (I think Josh Sawyer wrote or directed them?) and a pretty solid main campaign. Highly recommend even if you burn out on the first game.
Pathfinder WOTR, trying to become a devil. It's been an interesting playthrough, being lawful evil and using the 'justice' system for fun and profit :porky-happy: it's an interesting roleplaying space, realizing that lawful does not necessarily equal good.
Also the new system shock. It's pretty fun! Definitely feels like a game from 1994 at times. Very apparent that the game Does Not Like You, which is a good thing.
Wizard of legend: roguelite
Outer Wilds: its neat but still dont understand whats going on
Dmc 5: vergil beating my ass, so much harder than everything prior
Guilty gear strive: practicing in the vain hope that i eventually win a game at my local
Valorant: because my friends dint reslly play anything else
Outer Wilds: its neat but still dont understand whats going on
Don't stress about it, there's no "wrong" way and everything has hints forward. Always jealous of people getting to play this for the first time.
most recent activity
Cureently trying to recover the drone i threw into a seed portal thing, without getting eaten by fish
I mean that's the only "scary" area. The rest of the game is only scary in the sense of you being a normal person, exploring a whole solar system that keeps moving even if you're in the way.
Street fighter vi!!! Street fighter vi! Street fighter vi! Street fighter vi!!!!
Pathfinder WOTR mostly, I've run through the game a couple of times with different mythic paths, (not gonna bother doing all of them though).
Right now I'm midway through act 5 as an Aeon and have just managed to reach true Aeon.
ESO: Necrom drops on the weekend, so depending on whether the European servers shit the bed again I might try that new class out.
Dragon Quest V Remake on PS2. It's the perfect old-school JRPG and it doesn't overstay its welcome. Three acts with the middle one being the longest and you could finish it in about 35 hours but it's taking me longer because I'm playing it in Japanese and really digging into every nook and cranny.
It also did monster collecting 3 years before Pokemon.
Don't be! I wish more people would chime in with not-technically-videogame content.
Word of mouth is the best way to find cool new stuff and I trust the general user of this site infinitely more than some random comment elsewhere
Stellaris authoritarian xenophobic imperialist run. I'm nearly done with this one.
Next up is a synthetic pacifist run.
prepare for a journey where you may lose so much time lol. but you'll come out the other side feeling like you took a few college courses
If you're at all interested in building airplanes then I recommend getting a joystick. MASSIVELY easier to fly a plane with.
Also, did you get Blackrack's volumetric clouds mod? It's super new but an instant must have, imo.
Sounds like you already know what you're doing then lol. Good call with mechjeb.
I absolutely adore KSP and it's a shame how bad KSP2 currently is in comparison. Hopefully that gets sorted at some point because the concept of dumb rocket shenanigans with friends sounds great.
I finished The House in Fata Morgana a few days ago. It's a visual novel about tragedies in a cursed mansion. I don't want to say more because it's a game that benefits from going in blind. It's a masterpiece and I highly recommend it.
Playing Tunic now. I usually don't like when games make things more difficult than they need to be by actively refusing to explain mechanics, but I like Tunic's interpretation of that and how it makes that confusion a central part of the experience. The combat is kind of clunky though.
- dota 2
- got into Fallout: New Vegas for some reason. It's a 13 year old game and I've only played it for like an hour or two before the other day, but I decided it's finally time to dive into it or just uninstall and hide from my Steam library.
got into Fallout: New Vegas for some reason. It’s a 13 year old game
I had to double check that. I could have sworn that game was older
I just finished Shin Megami Tensei IV, so I guess the sequel SMT IV: Apocalypse.
The gameplay and music of IV are great, but the narrative kinda shits the bed around 3/4 of the way in at the alignment-lock. The game has a heavy neutral bias (1), yet makes it hilariously difficult to reach the neutral ending path without following a guide and they are a bit too self-referential especially when it comes to the older games. Just because a game released in 1992 on a 6mb SNES cartridge had a black and white morality and simplistic writing does not mean your 2013 release should be the same. Also there were some blatant undertones of Japanese nationalism in parts of the writing. It managed to avoid being racist, unlike Yakuza, but was still kinda :sus-deep:
(1) - Law in SMT - Following a greater power or ideology in the service of societal harmony, even at the cost of suppressing one's own desires. Usually led by the Abrahamic God (Yes really. In some games, you can fight him); Chaos in SMT - Freedom at any cost, as well as doing what you want. Usually led by Lucifer. There's games where these are more or less benevolent (like say law's good ending in Strange Journey Redux is basically communism, while Chaos in SMT 2 has a revolutionary nature against a fascist theocracy), while in others they go all in on the awfulness and are usually a choice between genocidal theocracies and an ancap criminal dystopia.
Still had a good time, despite the last stretch of the game pissing me off. Hilariously, the tutorial level boss is the hardest part of the game, but it never really gets as easy as Persona. [Mild NSFW - Booba + SMT IV Law path spoiler] This wins the writing award of shame .
B / 7,25/10
The sequel has a reputation for being weeb-brained and somewhat persona-y, and it certainly does feel somewhat different than usual in tone, but I kinda like the premise of
spoiler
the plot happening in parallel to SMT IV's.
It managed to avoid being racist, unlike Yakuza
:lenin-confused:
"Foreigners" (most often Chinese and Korean people) are portrayed almost universally as organized criminals, but not funny wacky nice criminals like yakuza. That's the main thing it does. Of course the games are going to humanize and make excuses for the yakuza, because those are the characters and its from their point of view I guess. But organized gangs from elsewhere in the world are all portrayed as ruthless, vicious murderers.
It doesn't help that every Chinese person in a Yakuza game is one of like two things. They're a simpering docile old man who sells noodles and lives in the one slum area. Or they're some gangster, but not like...a gangster. These guys are like fighters in the Boxer Rebellion from 1899. They're wearing queues and have giant piandao swords. They have staffs and do kungfu. They have hideouts that look like a Qing dynasty palace with antique vases and jade dragon statues. It's goofy and racist.
There are a few other instances of the games stereotyping black people as well, but the Chinese and Korean stuff is the worst.
I can agree with this for earlier games, althought it brings into question whether a piece of media can portray foreign crime syndicates in a negative light at all (like the Jingweong don't strike me as particularly Korean in some stereotypical way, they just are Korean. The Saio Triad from 6 seems a bit less stereotypically Chinese than the Snake Flower which has all the wacky Kung Fu shit, but that aesthetic is kind of predominant in fighting games in general. Not entirely sure if it is malicious, probably just :japan-cool: brainworms)
I'm curious about your take on Like a Dragon. I thought it did a good job of humanizing the Geomijul and Liumang and their struggles as Korean and Chinese immigrant groups in Japan. They have scumbags in them but are led by people who are mostly shown to be honorable and become your allies. Which honestly seems kinda problematic in that it whitewashed criminal organizations, but this is the Yakuza series lmao
Haven't played LAD7 yet but I'm glad to hear they've worked through some of the writing issues from earlier games. I do like how the games often have a sympathetic portrayal of stuff like poverty, losing family, or adapting to new environments. I also like the constant messages of how you should be nice to kids.
I'm pretty sure Japanese media standards are stricter than you'd see in North America, yeah. There are state censors in Japan, and most pieces of media need a license to have a mainstream release from what I know. There are various laws concerning games/movies that would glorify crime or actions against the government. For instance, you'll notice you never actually fight a police officer in the Yakuza games. I'm pretty sure that's why there are so many lines about that Saejima's prison island in 4 being illegitimate or not connected to the government. Sega didn't want to risk glorifying a prison breakout and getting censored or denied release.
Maybe this is part of why the games have an easier time portraying the rival gangs as more malicious? I don't know.
Interesting detail about the state censors in Japan, but not all that surprising. I'm reminded of when I recently watched Kurosawa's Drunken Angel, which was made in 1948 and takes place in a bombed out Japanese town and was subject to the censorship of the American occupation.
For instance, you’ll notice you never actually fight a police officer in the Yakuza games
During the final long battle of Judgment, you fight a shitload of cops. No twists, just straight up cops. And it fucking rocks. Aside from that, I think your theory probably holds water.
Saejima’s [...] in 4
Which kinda sucks, as the infamous plot twist from that game throws away his arc of
spoiler
"I'm a murderer and I fucking regret it". The Colosseum speech to the bloodthirsty crowd he gives is one of my favorite moments from the series.
Many of the Yakuza games for some reason always end up with Chinese, Korean and similar villains. who are shown to be utterly ruthless monsters until le wholesome crime man Kazuma Kiryu shows up to defeat them and let the Japanese mafia (the good one, the Tojo Clan - only because it's the one the MC usually belongs to) return to power.
I mean we are shown again and again that the Tojo Clan fucking sucks like pretty much all the other yakuza clans, who are also filled to the brim with irredeemable monsters. Is it any surprise that the foreign crime syndicates might also be filled with monsters? Perhaps better diversity within these groups could have helped, and this is something that I feel later games have handled well (Like a Dragon). I have a hard time accepting that it is racist to portray criminals who happen to be foreign as bad when they basically fit the same mold of evil schemers as literally everyone else. Kiryu just wants the Tojo to leave him alone but keeps getting dragged back into their affairs because his personal life somehow becomes intertwine, and he also feels he owes it to Daigo. I do see where you're coming from with how the Tojo problem is sometimes portrayed as simply being a matter of the wrong people running it, but LAD also kinda put that to rest.
Yeah, I haven't finished Like a Dragon yet. I was going by the 0-6 series.
Understandable, I'm of the opinion that the writing of this series has continously improved and has come to rely less on the campy tropes of the past, which happens to include le spooky and mysterious foreign crime rings. They'll always be a part of the series because these tropes are pretty much baked into the genre, but the way in which they are handled has improved imo
I know the games have different writers, but it's sometimes so frustrating when they can't decide if the Tojokai is actually good or not. Kiryu will spend an entire game trying to dismantle them, or get away from them, and then in the next he's rebuilding the Tojo to fight against the dastardly Omi. That happens like 4 times.
Still really good games though. Better written than most games. Cool characters, neat plots, side stories are hilarious. I'll love them until I die.
Yeah, like how in Yakuza 2, the Koreans were shown to be extremely ruthless and cruel by just murdering any member of the Jingweon mafia that did something bad once, unlike the highly civilized and honorable Yakuza, who just demand you chop off a finger
While SMT/Persona have never been a series that's done it for me (I've never cared much for turn-based games), I absolutely love reading about the shenanigans general plot insanity that happens in those games.
Thanks for the write up. If you ever want to expand on other funny/bizzare/whatever things in those games in spoiler tags I'd be glad to read more.
Finished Nioh (including Abyss up to level 20), so now it's on to Nioh 2. Only thing I didn't do was the last bonus DLC mission where you fight the two final bosses simultaneously.
Still occasionally playing Deep Rock Galactic with friends but not much.
Been playing Barotrauma with my friends mostly. Been busy, so haven't really had time for solo gaming.
I played a lot of FTL years ago so I'll have to look into Barotrauma at some point.
Is the description of it being a mashup of FTL, Rimworld, and Dwarf Fortress pretty accurate?
Not really at all imo. Maybe some FTL, but its more, 'physics/immersive sim' like.
FTL, Rimworld, and DF are all great, but they're more about 'management'. There's some of that if you play Barotrauma single player (because you have to order semi-autonomous Bots around as well as control yourself).
But with a group of players its closer to, idk, RUST maybe? Like, obliviously, its not an FPS at all, but it give kinda a similar 'vibe' to managing a 'squad', as threats and foes and bullshit is thrown at you, while trying to keep everyone alive. I like it, because its good to give each player their own role: the captain drives, the medic is who you run to when your hurt or infected, the mechanics keeps the hulls fixed and the engine running, the engineer keeps the electrical systems and reactor running, and the security officer is the best turret gunner and personal fighter, but also in smaller groups, everyone kinda has to do a bit of everything.
In a way, its thematically closest to like, 'Star Trek', of doing mining/exploration missions, while dealing with keeping shit running and weird alien threats.
The game does optionally have 'amongus' stuff, as there is modes to like, enable a traitor, but honestly its not well supported, and seems like its more an excuse to grief groups that have open games online. I haven't personally touched it.
Thanks for clearing that up. Still sounds like something I'd be interested in
