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The Shadow news made me very happy. In general, I’m really enjoying Sonic post Frontiers…it feels like Sega is finally taking the franchise back in a direction I like.

1) FSN finally getting a release is amazing because that means "Read the VN" actually has ground now and I can get rightfully frustrated when I see people recommend Zero first.

2) While most people automatically went to Ghost of Tsushima for in terms of comparisons, my mind actually went into a completely different direction when they were showcasing Rise.

Way of the Samurai.

If anyone's played WotS, Rise basically screams Way of the Samurai without the jank and a more consistent tone. They even brought up the fact that your relationships can determine how the story progresses which is something Way of the Samurai's done since the very first game. Heck, even the first time game alone needed a spreadsheet to showcase all the branching paths and narrative slips back and forth between the different routes. It makes me wonder how in depth the system will be because if its at least on par with WotS 1, I could see myself coming back to the game repeatedly.

3) Otherwise, the only other thing that interested me was Sonic X Shadow Generations. (Is it Cross a la Japanese crossovers? Is it X, like how western titles go?) I never had the opportunity to play the first Generations back in the day but it makes me wonder how they'll handle Shadow since he doesn't have the radically different takes on the character like Sonic did with Genesis-era Classic and Adventure-post Sonic. There's already a ton of Shadow (2005/6) in there so how will they separate Shadows' stuff? But bringing back Black Doom of all characters though...

That's a deep pull.

4) I do have to say this though: I really can't stand how much worship Kojima gets at these things. Its honestly why I only watch them in post so I can skip all of his stuff. I think last year's TGAs was basically the breaking point for me. I just don't think its fair to other devs who get maybe a couple minutes to showcase their stuff at most while Kojima gets however he long he wants.

GNPixie wrote:

4) I do have to say this though: I really can't stand how much worship Kojima gets at these things. It’s honestly why I only watch them in post so I can skip all of his stuff. I think last year's TGAs was basically the breaking point for me. I just don't think it’s fair to other devs who get maybe a couple minutes to showcase their stuff at most while Kojima gets however he long he wants.

To be fair I think Kojima is greasing palms or if not the companies behind this showcases are pulling strings.

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I never got a chance to play the recent Sonic Colors remaster (because Xenoblade), but word on the street is that it's apparently not the best

And then it got patched by Sega & became much better. I played through Colors on my Xbox a couple of years ago after it got patched & I had a great time with. At this point no one should really take initial responses to major games anymore, & instead wait to see the response post-patch, and even then you sometimes just have to see for yourself.

It's like when the IGS Arcade Collection came out, the FGC utterly trashed it, and no one ever bothered to actually see if some of the issues (like a lack of proper 4:3 toggle) got addressed, because they did but no one really talked about it because they had already made up their minds.

I didn't know the devs for Stellar Blade also made Nikke. That does explain why the first thing that jumps out is how pretty the characters are. Setting that aside, I do hope it turns out to be good. Stuff like this has been on a bit of a backburner while Souls-like games have become more common, and I'd kind of like to have something that scratches that Devil May Cry itch since we haven't gotten anything official about a DMC6.

Yeesh, I basically don't have any hope for the video game industry as a whole getting their shit together at the moment with all these horrifying amounts of layoffs that feel really poorly considered in the long term. Maybe 10 years from now there'll be enough momentum to actually improve labor conditions for everyone, but who knows. Sorta glad (but also sad because geez) that I never actually got into that industry like I once wanted to.

Also quick minor correction:

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The Lunar Legend Tsukihime remaster is due to be released worldwide later this year...

This should be remake, the original VN would be super cool too (plus Aniplex quality would actually be an improvement over Mirror Moon) but we're getting the super fancy new art and music and rewritten Near Side routes.

Also slightly hurts to see you be so dismissive of stuff like the new God of War games, since they're much better and more complex than you're giving them credit for (only The Last of Us is really like that), but I also really want to see Sony diversify again like the PS3 era where they took chances on Echochrome and Flower and Journey and shtuff. I still mourn the loss of Japan Studio.

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But the visual novel itself was always trapped in an ivory tower, for some reason. And we never really had an answer why. For all we know, TYPE-MOON just didn't grasp just how beloved Fate is in the US.

It really is truly baffling. The best time to have release FS/N would have been 10 years ago with the hype train of Fate/Zero, the Unlimited Blade Works series, the movies, etc. FGO is popular, but old news too; it feels like it’s been around for ages. So… why now? I had come to think that Sony and the corporate interests had become embarrassed by the original VN and preferred for the anime and mobile game to represent the franchise in the west, but I guess that’s not the case at all. I just totally don’t get it.

Oh well, not a Fate fan anyways. I did, however, pre-order the ridiculously expensive Muv-Luv trilogy box for Switch, because I am a whale and a tool.

Other piece of interesting gaming news this week is that peripheral maker PDP is making a new Rock Band guitar controller in the year 2024, long after instrument controllers became impossible to obtain. It’s a dearly-welcomed gift to the loyal Rock Band 4 holdouts, but also a sop to Harmonix’s new role as Borg drones within Epic Games, made to produce Fortnite Festival because apparently everything has to be f’ing Fortnite.

Last edited by BadNewsBlues on Fri Feb 02, 2024 3:09 pm; edited 1 time in total

invalidname wrote:

[It’s a dearly-welcomed gift to the loyal Rock Band 4 holdouts, but also a sop to Harmonix’s new role as Borg drones within Epic Games, made to produce Fortnite Festival because apparently everything has to be f’ing Fortnite.

I mean either that or be stuck with EA helping contribute to the oversaturation and ultimately death of the music rhythm genre they helped build up in the U.S.

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So folks appreciate the janky combat; it adds to the terror of the scenario and forces you to really fret over what your next move will be—especially when you're surrounded by monsters. So giving folks a trailer that focuses on James Sunderland running around, bashing monsters upside the head with nail bats, and gunning down the creepy faceless nurses really doesn't give fans a lot of hope that the spirit of Silent Hill 2 is being preserved. Folks are comparing the footage to the Resident Evil 4 Remake—which, for a Silent Hill game, is a bad thing. Resident Evil is also a survival horror series, but it's always had a bit more allowance for action.

Pepperidge Farm remembers Resident Evil fans spending the last 17 years following the release of the original Resident Evil 4. Whining and moaning about Capcom making the next few Resident Evil games with combat that doesn’t intentionally suck and isn’t worsened with terrible camera angles. So even with that reasoning in mind few of them were willing to accept that reasoning regarding the gameplay change.

Not to mention if you’re going to intentionally make a game with janky gameplay elements in this day and age you’re probably better off just not making it to begin with .

F/SN Having an official translation seems like a great thing. And yeah, I'm not missing Nasu's attempt at writing sex. I'm sure someone is going to raise a stink decrying the lack as "censorship" or some other silliness- but that was all just terribly written nonsense. The Nasuverse is fully of kinky stuff-which is fine by me! - but the execution of those sex scenes was terrible. And forced by VN expectations of the time- at least from what I've heard.

I'm also eating a bit of crow this week. I was absolutely certain, given the many delays and changes in development involved, that in Granblue Fantasy Relink ever actually released it would be hot garbage. But its pretty decent actually. Happy to be wrong.

Yeah, nothing much more to say about those layoffs other than I hate that I was right. Barely into the year and that merger is already a complete disaster that has damaged the industry as a whole. The judges and regulatory bodies who okayed it are flaming morons.

As for better news, Dragon's Dogma II looks greats but I'm really intrigued by Rise of the Ronin as the Bakumatsu is a time period you don't see often in games. It looks like they're basically making a Nioh followup with more movement and in a sandbox, so I'm down. Now to wonder when the inevitable Ninja Gaiden cameo comes up.

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4) I do have to say this though: I really can't stand how much worship Kojima gets at these things. Its honestly why I only watch them in post so I can skip all of his stuff. I think last year's TGAs was basically the breaking point for me. I just don't think its fair to other devs who get maybe a couple minutes to showcase their stuff at most while Kojima gets however he long he wants.

I'm mostly just bored of him now. Strangely, his work getting more fantastical has actually made it less interesting due to the lack of juxtaposition. MGS worked because of the interplay between the special forces stories and the fantastical, much like how Futaro Yamada did the same with ninjas in his novels or Hideyuki Kikuchi basically doing spaghetti western stories in Vampire Hunter D. Kojima is just making a bunch of spectacle and as such I was bored during that trailer. Kojima has bought into his own hype and that's never good.

BadNewsBlues wrote:

Pepperidge Farm remembers Resident Evil fans spending the last 17 years following the release of the original Resident Evil 4. Whining and moaning about Capcom making the next few Resident Evil games with combat that doesn’t intentionally suck and isn’t worsened with terrible camera angles. So even with that reasoning in mind few of them were willing to accept that reasoning regarding the gameplay change.

Disliking tank controls is one thing, but I think the static camera angles helped add suspense and horror to the first 3 games. Not knowing where that sound of a zombie or other creature is coming from was a nice thing to have to deal with. They also used them very effectively like in the remake of the first game where the first time you encounter the giant spiders is going through a door and the camera is angled upward and you just see one casually crawl onto the screen above you on the ceiling.

I personally never had a problem with Silent Hill 2's combat. If the remake makes it better than so be it. I'm more worried about the changes to the story and characters.

For Death Stranding, I never played the first game because the trailers made it look really boring and the gameplay I saw was the same. The trailer for DS2 though looks actually interesting and crazy and back to the old Kojima I knew and loved. I don't know if the first game was like that and the trailers sucked or if this is entirely new for the second game, but I might actually play this one.

Stellar Blade looks fun but also weird. It's just crazy to me it's a PlayStation game since it seems so unfitting and not in line with the direction Sony went after becoming more westernized. It just feels like a game that can't possible exist in 2024, and I mean that in a good way!

Now that the Palworld blitz has passed, I do hope people revisit some of the other games that came out recently since they're pretty interesting.

I honestly really enjoyed playing that game, but if you were to ask me where the artistry was, I would tell you that I wasn't actually sure.

Most of the discourse surrounding the game wasn't really about the game... it was just the endless Pokemon comparisons (even though I'm not sure Palworld remedies people's problem with RPGs mostly moving away from numbers and towards bloaty action games where I roll my face across the controller once my numbers are high enough), so it's apparent, at least to me, who has the stronger cultural impact that will endure through the years.

I saw a lot of interesting discussion in last week's thread, so I didn't really chime in. The only maybe unique thought I have to contribute is that I do wonder if controversy and shamelessness is how we want to raise up our smaller devs.

I've played automation and survival type games where the mechanics at least kind of work. My friend rage quit his Palworld file because the cat or dog could not navigate to the thing they needed to navigate to do jobs, so his end game experience became a slog. I don't remember games like Satisfactory being this jank even in earlier access.

(as to whether or not those games eventually met their objectives as they moved towards 1.0, I will leave that discussion up to other people... but I don't think you can reasonably argue that something like Factorio is bad in its current post complete state)

I don't really feel bad for like Pokemon company or whatever AAA game is getting bodied by Palworld's return on investment. I feel bad about other smaller devs that clearly put their hearts and souls into a game, but never had the opportunity to go viral because they weren't based on cynical ideas or marketing.

We're like two years out from something like Freedom Planet 2 and it's sad that no one has probably played it despite their issues with Sonic for many years. They'd rather talk about how Sonic is bad than putting time into playing something that they might think is actually good.

I did think Frontiers was OK, but I can see why people would like something like Spark the Jester 3 better, which had an amazing game feel from the little time I've put into it... and it was from like a solo dev or something. The level of precision you have while moving around is amazing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hh_gGI8_nfs

Anyway, I didn't get too far with Palworld. I mostly remember never experiencing a raid since I built my base in the beginner area in a place where the AI couldn't navigate and then I moved onto a new shiny since Tekken came out and it had more interesting things for me to do.

I grinded for like 50 hours and I finally kind of learned how to do wave dash with Reina kind of consistently, but now I am beginning to question whether or not I actually know how to play Tekken:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7UsYtZe8ZM

I really liked Street Fighter 6, but I think I like Tekken 8 better, even in its current state where it seems like traditional Tekken fundamentals are taking a backseat to people holding forward and jailing people into stupid pointblank mixups. There's just something unusually compelling about overcoming the game's mechanical denseness, though I think it helps me in particular now that training mode is actually functional and I can develop a gameplan that actually works in a real match.

They have that new easy mode controls, but it seems like it's a really awful version of modern style controls since, outside of possibly the Mishimas since electrics are just a button (albeit a significantly slower version of it that you can't use to punish anything), they give you a few set options, but none of them will really help you out as a beginner that wants to push buttons to overcome the game's oppressiveness.

Or I dunno: maybe I need to put more time into the style mode thing, so I'm open to differing ideas... but it just seems bad and not helpful in the learning process.

Also, I've been mashing Granblue Fantasy Relink as well since I wanted something new and shiny to do. The game is quite fun.

One of the more interesting aspects of the gameplay is that it seems like dodge offset is a very important mechanic since it seems like most of a character's gimmicks are reliant on getting to your combo ender.

I tried playing around with Katalina. Her gimmick involves getting a summon phantom or something whenever you hit your combo ender. In the early game state, it seems like this takes about 4 combo enders to activate, then you get significantly stronger attacks that come out whenever you do combo enders, skill attacks or I think link attacks.

One thing that is not particularly intuitive about playing her, I think, it that she has a million stab move that takes forever to animate and that you need to dodge offset this in order to get the combo ender faster. Otherwise, you're likely not going to get to the combo ender if you're fighting something that doesn't have hitsun and swings around like a caveman like me when I play Tekken:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SAW-RgKTbw

I hope the skill tree introduces more options at some point as opposed to more numbers. In particular, my wishlist is for a second jump, air laucher and a teleport since running to things is annoying.

While the system doesn't seem like it's as sophisticated as more core action games where I'm like doing dodge offest with teleport or whatever, it's still pretty fun and very much worth playing, I think. If me and my friends stop derping around, I'm hoping we can actually coordinate long enough to get multiplayer in.

Also, as a reminder, Team Ninja still makes fantastic games and people should go back and play them:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOhypQF4nx4

(even though I'm being too lazy to whip out the PS5 for their new game and will probably just wait for the PC release since Dragon's Dogma 2 is out around this time...)

I'm thankful none of the video game layoffs have really affected any of the stuff I play. Not that the companies I do pay attention to are perfect. I see Persona 3 Reload is doing the Resident Evil 4 Remake thing of selling you a bare-bones game with the cut content being sold back to you as DLC (if those leaks are true about FES being a DLC). Although in this case Persona 3 costs 70 dollars. I'm perfectly fine waiting until it's on sale and down to 20 bucks or so in a few months if I ever decide to play it. Gaming kind of stink nowadays, don't it? The whole industry's current state makes me appreciate the rare gems that we do get like Palworld all the more.

The only thing I'm looking forward to with regard to the Silent Hill 2 remake is the inevitable evisceration Yahtzee Croshaw, Stephanie Sterling and other lifelong lovers of the original are going to give it.

Mike Dohzart wrote:

Gaming kind of stink nowadays, don't it?

The video game industry has always had a checkered history. It’s just that compared to things from the old days like the designers who worked on the games and such not being credited in the game games intentionally being designed so you couldn’t easily beat them in a single setting. We as consumers in the modern era are more aware of dubious shit like layoffs or companies gobbling up other major companies.

i got the shivers! wrote:

Disliking tank controls is one thing, but I think the static camera angles helped add suspense and horror to the first 3 games. Not knowing where that sound of a zombie or other creature is coming from was a nice thing to have to deal with.

All well and good until they both cause you to run into a zombie’s arms for the 20th time.

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