all-knight-party

Yeah, I hope people don’t mistake bad comedy for letting the games down. The games probably got a laugh out of me once every 75 jokes.

Just beat Catherine Full Body last night. There are a lot of things I like about the game, and some things I both like and dislike. It’s really more of a “this is the main character’s story and you’re mostly along for the ride” than it is a narrative experience where you choose every move the protagonist makes.

Because of that, I think how you feel about the story will be determined by your own stance on relationships and the morality of them, hedonism, marriage, and things like that. For me, I felt familiarity with my experience watching Breaking Bad in its painful spectation of characters who make questionable decisions and their creation of damning consequences.

Easy mode treated the puzzles well, just takes away the time pressure of the blocks falling away (save for the boss battles where you’re being chased). I ended up quite enjoying the puzzles! In the end, I don’t know if I’d recommend the game. If you’re interested in games doing something neat and novel with the topic of relationships then I think you’ll find value in it.

I did that with the first KoTOR a year ago! It was more difficult than using a saber for sure, you really get the impression they didn’t really think anyone would want to main blasters. How is it in the second one?

I am agnostic, does that count? I feel like to “say something” about agnosticism would just be to define it. I can say that I started staunchly atheist, and then realized after being a petulant teenager that there was no way I really knew enough to believe in atheism either.

Just beat Slay the Princess twice. Wow, really lived up to the hype for me. Excellent writing and art. Excellent… Format and pacing for a visual novel with a lot of different choices. The themes it explores are incredibly interesting and varied.

I heartily recommend it to anyone who enjoys a VN with a mysteriously intriguing story.

Funnily enough, the game is basically stuck at 60 FPS for me, even though I have a 144hz monitor. Everything I look up says the game engine wasn’t configured to go past that and anything higher requires mods and such for it to be supported. I’m a relatively modest gamer who plays a lot of Switch, so as long as it’s consistent I don’t mind, I just keep it at 60.

Glad to know Starfield can go higher, but my computer isn’t amazing so newer games just don’t stay consistent above 60, I just cap Starfield at 60 as well.

While I’m sad that you had to disconnect from your family, I’m glad you had the strength to realize that it’s better that way, at least for now. Maybe they will come around. It can be a real shock to some people, and maybe they just need time to process how different it feels, but I won’t pretend to know your exact situation.

Thank you for your response!

How did your friends and family handle and support your transition? I’m always hopeful that your support system will prove that they were there for you and not for their idea of you.

If by modern you mean Fallout 3 and beyond, then absolutely New Vegas and its DLCs. You will not get anything of a deep story from any of the other offerings except maybe Fallout 4’s Far Harbor, but that comes too little too late if you might not tolerate Fallout 4’s flaws to get there.

New Vegas doesn’t play very well in terms of combat, hello Gamebryo engine, but it has a complex story with many possible directions and endings, and many factions that are much more than black and white. Your character’s own dialogue is also far better written compared to Bethesda’s offerings and has a lot more agency in the world. I think you will find enough to enjoy there as long as you can get past the hump of some middling (even for its time) shooting.

A lot of that can be owed to the staff similarities between the original Fallouts and New Vegas, Obsidian’s strong point, particularly Josh Sawyer as director.

I think that’s a lot of what happened back when it released. The most recent Fallout game before then was Fallout New Vegas, and when it comes to a narratively deep RPG that’s almost an unfair fight compared to anything Bethesda has put out, so of course Fallout 4 fell very short of that mark.

But it does have successes in other areas. For the first time in, shit, any Bethesda game ever I found the animations and feedback of moment to moment combat actually enjoyable, the junk gathering and upgrading is an extremely addictive loop, and the game does look genuinely pretty and immersive, though the character animations still let it down.

I liked it to the tune of multiple hundreds of hours, myself.

It just depends what you go into it looking for. If you want a deep RPG you won’t get it, and I found the story enjoyable, but just all right, but not horrible or anything. I do also really enjoy the gameplay.

The shooting won’t change the world, but it is enjoyable, and I really like the scavenging and modification of weapons and armor, and as a motivation for exploration it’s great.

At first I was like “how the fick are you going to write the entire LoTR trilogy in 49 seconds with a keyboard, much less spaghetti-o’s?!”

Depends on taste. I love mechanical depth and systems on systems and depending on how retro you’re talking most games older than, say early 2000s ish just don’t often have that

I much prefer the extremely deliberate aiming and the heavily physics influenced combat of Helldivers. Just makes it feel a lot deeper than EDF that sort of makes up for that granular detail by instead being extremely arcadey and over the top in its weapons and class abilities.

They play quite differently even though they have some surface similarities, but EDF is indeed also awesome and I wish it was more popular.

I suppose I’ll edit my comment to only mention the third

I’ve only played Witcher 3 and found a lot of the interesting parts of the world to be the darker parts you don’t see in other fantasy games, a lot of the themes of the quests are very heavy, like the bloody Baron’s quest as an easy popular mention.

Therefore, the addition of places like whorehouses or other quests related to that deepen the realism of the world in a way that something like Skyrim would absolutely never, and if those bits were ever censored out it would reduce the immersive realism of the world, to me

It depends on what the vision is supposed to be. If the dev was making a hentai game, but had the scenes censored, then that fundementally destroys the purpose of the game and ruins the point.

If it was a game like Stellar Blade which seems like it has a lot more going on in terms of story and worldbuilding, combat and death, then the sexual parts seem almost more exploitative and distract/clash with the primary themes. I have not played it and cannot say absolutely, though, in this case.

Then there are games like the Witcher 3 where sex plays a moderate part in the life of the protagonist and adds to the realism and grit of the world, and so sexual imagery actually adds to the game in that way.

So, I think it all depends on execution and perceived intent.

Edit: none of this is to say I support censorship, I think as long as content is clearly marked it should be up to the player what they want to see, I’m talking about what the censorship impacts in the game experience.

Disgaea 3 on the Vita had a loading screen with a prinny spinning like a ballerina. If you tilted the Vita the accelerometer would make him slide across the screen accordingly, like a spinning top

This is tricky, I can’t think of a drinking game that’s reliable, but also won’t kill you by the end of the first movie like this would

When I was a teenager I slipped and fell backwards at the beach and hit the back of my head on concrete, and exhibited light concussion symptoms for half a day afterwards. As I was falling backwards I had a good second and a half to go “well, this may be it, whether I’m ready or not”.