I finished Tenchu: Stealth Assassins earlier this week. Wow. I can't believe I almost didn't play this game. It was awesome! I didn't really enjoy the supernatural turn it took halfway through, but I loved the gameplay. I can't wait to go back and play through it with Ayame once I'm all caught up with my list in about ten or twenty years, haha.
Next up is Spyro the Dragon!
I feel like between the whole Dishonored series, Hitman still being made, and Last of Us 2 out next week, I feel like there have been plenty of stealth focused games in recent years. And check out Mark of the Ninja for a masterclass in them.I’m glad to hear you enjoyed Tenchu! Out of all the genres that have gone by the wayside the stealth genre is the one I miss the most.
Fallout 2 was amazing. It was, without a doubt, one of the best games I've played so far.
And then The Last of Us Part II came out and boy I got a lot to say about this one. My feelings on this game are about as mixed and messy as the game itself
I believe I’m one chapter away from the ending, but I doubt the game will perform much to lift itself above what it’s showed so far. This is looking like it’s going to be a 6/10 (or a 7 max) for me.
TL;DR this is not a great game by any means. A shame, really.
I've recently played through Castlevania 1, 3, Super IV, and Rondo of Blood
I did Alucard's path on 3(is that how it works? I never saw the other dudes) and am on the Dracula fight in Rondo.
Great stuff although I suck enough that I needed the save state function for 1/3/Super. In Rondo I did use Maria for a lot of it but decided to finish with Richter and might go back through to try as just him now that I'm used to the earlier stiffer controls.
I feel like if I could mix Rondo of Blood and Super's style it'd be perfect. I'm trying out Bloodlines as well right now which feels a bit weird but is cool.
I'm gonna try SotC once I've gone through all the "classicvania" style ones that I want to try.
I'll probably play it now, I was just craving the style of 1/3 a bit more, I also have heard the English translation messes up some of the actual hints that help complete the game although I could just look up online what to do. I'm surprised there hasn't been a re-release of it with a better translation over the years and getting rid of the slow transition times.Why the fuck aren't you playing Castlevania 2: Simon's Quest? It's a great game and you definitely should play it. It's different but not in a bad way.
Also there are several paths in Castlevania 3 but you can encounter more than one character in a single playthrough.
I'll probably play it now, I was just craving the style of 1/3 a bit more, I also have heard the English translation messes up some of the actual hints that help complete the game although I could just look up online what to do. I'm surprised there hasn't been a re-release of it with a better translation over the years and getting rid of the slow transition times.
Also been wondering if I should drop some money on VR stuff... Aaz and Griff are good marketers! All this on top of needing to finish Death Stranding still.
Also been wondering if I should drop some money on VR stuff... Aaz and Griff are good marketers!
All this on top of needing to finish Death Stranding still.
I love DS, especially the progression of your ability to move around faster/carry more cargo
That said, you would need some space to move around for many of the games. It's recommended to have at least 6.5 feet x 6.5 feet of empty space for maximum enjoyment.
That's it for now, in addition to the second part of Vader Immortal I'd also like to pick up on sale: Fallout 4, Virtual Rick-ality, DOOM VFR, Arkham VR, Star Trek: Bridge Crew (maybe I can play with Aaz and my dad like real nerds =), The Mage's Tale, and BONEWORKS (this one looks potentially special). There's a few other VR staples I'd like to check out, like Budget Cuts, Job Simulator, or something different like Moss, but they don't inherently interest me. I'd also like to check out In Death, which is supposed to be kind of a VR Souls-like built around archery.
Of course I also ewant ot get Asgard's Wrath, Lone Echo, and Stormland for Oculus, I just need some more time with the Revive app, which allows you to play Oculus your games in Steam VR, to make sure it'll all work.
I wish I had way more, bumped my hand into the back of my new computer chair a couple times last night despite it being pushing under the desk as far as can be, but I'm also standing closer to the PC so the cord is less of a factor.
I pretty much agree with all your points and was going to make some myself, particularly how derivative it is of an already repetitive game and genre (there's almost no notable difference from the first game), and how the disjointed narrative frustratingly kills the momentum, both in pace of story and gameplay, whenever it builds it up. "Hey, you're going to hate the game for a few hours while we switch gears, no biggie, right?" At least in Death Stranding or RDR2 if I get bored of the plot I can go do whatever in those worlds for a while and come back, here you're locked in to whatever they want you to do. The jumping around is also just ridiculous at times; flashbacks within flashbacks within flashbacks, years earlier, then months, days, etc. It'll honestly make you laugh (this is what killed Uncharted 4 for me). Also, many of those flashes are just overblown interactive cutscenes I loathe, like Left Behind. Naughty Dog is truly under the impression mundane small talk = real world depth. On that note, I will disagree about the flashbacks paralleling Joel's relationship with Ellie then and now being the best part. It's mostly boring, by the book material and what should be the biggest payoff of the game kinda just comes and goes and is barely followed up on, and not very coherently. There was a lot of interesting stuff they could have explored with those two, but they didn't. As a matter of fact, they introduced or foreshadowed possibilities with way more potential that they end up not even touching.
Yeah, it ain't going to help (I wouldn't rule out a 5 or less from you =). It also feels very abrupt after all that comes before, leaving several threads hanging, more interesting ones than the plot we got like I said, and as if it's still unfinished or they're keeping their powder dry for DLC. BUT...
Despite its flaws and how much better it could have been, I actually don't think it's that bad, or bad at all really, just a relative disappointment. Otherwise, the gameplay is fun, the visuals are A++, and the story IS ambitious and does pull off some interesting tricks I haven't seen before (YMMV with the "antagonist"), it's just all they had to sacrifice to achieve it probably wasn't worth the trade-off emotionally (another way it's a mess). Anyway, I just finished it and am still thinking about it, but yeah, it was alright, still impressive, but it doesn't top the original in any way but graphically, and the ending leaves me with more questions than answers, and not in a good way. What's funny is I found the original to be refreshingly harsh, pragmatic and nihilistic save for the end, and was ironically even more twisted for it (love DESTROYS all =), whereas this one is all empty emotion and sentiment, even when everybody's arbitrarily killing each other, or sometimes more strangely, not. I don't think that's the takeaway I was supposed to have, or even know what it was supposed to be, because it's a contrived and muddled murder/revenge tale no normal person can relate to or resonate with, whereas the core of the original is primordial and intrinsically applies to anyone that was born; the parent/child relationship.
For one example of missed plot opportunities: Abby's search for the reformed Fireflies and the collision course with Ellie coinciding. Is nobody interested in a potential cure anymore (I know the writers sure don't care about the infected when there's lazy melodrama to be had)? All that would have been more interesting and higher stakes than these two's schizophrenic personal conflict that neither seems interested in ultimately fulfilling despite killing approximately 10,000 people along the way. Also, not mutually exclusive, it would have just made things more complicated and interesting for both characters and their intersecting themes.
Yeah, that was another thing ND had to shove down our throats.Oh yeah, and for all the hamfistsd efforts at gender wokeness in this game (did you know slurs are bad? Murder too BTW, especially for revenge, but it is ok to get your people wiped out if they won't let you get a boy's cut though, not even an acknowledgement that didn't go well =), they picked a real bad time to have like two black characters, both villains in bit parts, one that you torture, plus a cameo from a speechless mini-boss that's basically a caricature of a scary black man out of a Klan pamphlet. Off the top of my head I can think of four better and more important African American characters from the first game. Oh, and there's also tons of lynching and a casual slavery plot point concerning... white slaves! Between that and all the guns, militias, and demographics this game is inadvertently portraying a white supremacist's ideal future. Come on Problem Internet, give me the takes!
Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners should also be on your list, and relatively high.
Yeah those three are really great, and there's a bunch of other nice ones if you get it working. For example they've released a new game today called Phantom: Covert Ops and it's pretty cool so far.
Haha, the dream is an empty garage! I have about 200 sq ft of space myself, which is pretty luxurious, but it could always be more...
True, they went overboard with some of these flashbacks. But I did think some of them were pretty nice
Would they actually go for a DLC at this point? Especially when we consider the massive backlash they’re getting. I think I’ll just give it a pass if it gets made. I doubt any DLC they come up with can fix this train wreck of a plot.
Oh, for sure. I didn’t mean to imply the game as a whole was terrible. It’s just not a great game, one that is worthy of its predecessor, and certainly not the masterpiece gaming publications would have you believe it is.
I think it would have served them better to have the game center about a theme of something like forgiveness for example. As in, have Joel and Ellie leave their town for one reason or another (like in Fallout 1, when you leave to fetch a water chip for your vault), and during their journey they would deal with the fact that he lied to her about what happened in TLOU1, with Ellie eventually forgiving him.
You know, this part about the cure/vaccine is what I thought to be one of the strangest parts of the story, in both 1 and 2. I mean, I don’t find it believable that the fireflies, in a post-apocalypse with limited resources and one human subject, could engineer a vaccine for a disease that ended civilization. Do these writers not know how hard and complex it is to create a vaccine for far less potent diseases? This is also not touching on other problems, like how will the fireflies have the capability to mass produce the thing, to distribute it, etc. Maybe I’m thinking too much into this
One of the cringiest scenes in the game was when you walk into the siblings’ house and Yara finds out that her mom died when Lev accidentally made her fall and crack her skull open. What does Yara do? Does she freak out? No. She just rationalizes Lev’s behavior (“it was self-defense. You did nothing wrong.”) You kidding me? Your mom’s head just split in two and you’re being this chill about it? Sure, she had an initial “reaction”, but she recovered rather fast. It doesn’t help that they just leave their mother’s body as it is and walk out of the house and behave more or less the same way they always have since you met them. That scene was just…That entire chapter was wholly unnecessary.
I don’t know if it’s just me, but I felt it to be another one of those “notifications” by ND reminding us of how inclusive they are. No subtlety whatsoever. They could have just been natural about it, but no, we had to be reminded at every opportunity.
Oh well, going to finish the game soon, and I doubt the ending will change what I feel about it much, in one direction or the other. I think this will be an overall decent game at best, one that has major defects as opposed to simple blemishes. We’ll see.
So, one of he bigots of the CRAZY RELIGIOUS CULT is....deadamng, and so ND is shit because they make a clearly bad person do a bad thing.Well, apparently not (lol):
'Last of Us 2' deadnaming prompts outcry from LGBTQ+ community and allies
Naughty Dog's decision to deadname Lev, a transgender character in 'TLOU 2,' has prompted condemnation from members and allies of the LGBTQ+ community.www.inverse.com
The Ellie and Joel flashbacks weren't the big problem, I think they actually needed at least one more of those, it was just how many flashbacks or time and perspective changes we had to endure. The way they did it from the very beginning is distractingly disjointed and kills momentum and enthusiasm (how many times do you want to "just get through" a segment?).
Well, I feel like it's almost necessary, which isn't great. We'll talk more after you wrap it up, but I can think of at least three or four different concepts that follow with either Ellie, Joel or even Abby depending on the timeframe.
Yeah, it's inherently flawed, has incredibly high quality production values, but creatively somehow less than the sum of its parts. I mean, it's not really a mystery though: the plot simply isn't that good outside of the devices, or gimmicks, its employing.
That somehow got short shrift despite it being one of the thematic pillars of the game. Like, you never really hear them talk it out. There's a TON Joel would have to say about it and vice versa with Ellie, but the dialogue just wasn't written apparently. I mean, I get that these two are repressed, but Jesus they spend four years together afterward and can't just SAY how they feel about each other, good and bad? It doesn't come off as subtle and nuanced so much as superficial. Like, write a killer scene. Same thing with Ellie and Dina, and Abby too, really (all these characters never end up saying shit to each other despite their connections!). In the original what wasn't said in the end was significant because it was this dark shadow cast over everything, here it just strikes me as inept.
Yes, you are thinking too much about it. =) But it's a plot point baked into the cake already that Ellie has the magical cure, but nobody seemingly cares anymore, or only one guy could do anything about it? It doesn't make much sense either way. Abby sure didn't seem to give a shit, which makes me want to know her specific thoughts on the subject now, because before she expressed willingness to sacrifice her own life for it and here's a chance to truly make things right and apparently it doesn't occur to her. I mean, I guess she's a stupid asshole, but you'd think after reforming herself this would be something worth unpacking. I mean, I don't need everything spelled out, I just find these topics and themes far more compelling than whatever the hell they were, or weren't, doing.
Agreed, Lev was like a low key villain at that point who destroys everybody's life that he knows because he has to have his way vis-à-vis his family, but it's all okay because he faced discrimination. I mean, how can he live with himself after what ultimately happens? His hands are as dirty as Ellie's and Abby's, if not dirtier (well, maybe not Ellie's, the game fails to address the extent of her sins as well, but at least it's clearly punishing her somewhat). It's a trope I hate in storytelling where someone goes rogue acting selfishly, stubbornly, irrationally or hysterically, puts everyone at risk or gets people killed, and then basically gets a pat on the head and a pass for it, "It's ok, you had to do what you thought was right even though it was obviously wrong, everyone knew it, you didn't listen to anybody, and people needlessly died because of it, as you were warned." Not a great message for all the selfish narcissists out there right now, "Do whatever you want, damn the consequences!" Now THAT'S too close to current reality.
It would mean more if it was just there, but it's clearly performative and they're trying to prove something about themselves and it comes off perfunctory at best and exploitative at worst (like all of a sudden two weeks ago Druckmann says the game is based on a lynching he saw as a kid... yikes). I think we're already past the idea of token inclusiveness mattering so much when you need the people behind the scenes to actually be lesbian, bi-sexual or transgender telling their own stories rather than it being window dressing for an off-brand Quentin Tarantino grindhouse yarn. I guess that's clearly not happening in AAA game development though, so kudos for at least trying to pave the way I guess. Don't know that it helped in the grand scheme, but hopefully it will at least be meaningful to the underrepresented groups it features.
Well, apparently not (lol):
'Last of Us 2' deadnaming prompts outcry from LGBTQ+ community and allies
Naughty Dog's decision to deadname Lev, a transgender character in 'TLOU 2,' has prompted condemnation from members and allies of the LGBTQ+ community.www.inverse.com
Yeah, I haven't fired it up again since the other day but we'll see where I eventually land on it. I may actually like Abby the best about it, but that might just be because she had the most cohesive arc while they kind of butchered Ellie's story.
Yeah. I played the game on hard, but some of these segments were so boring that I turned down the difficulty to the minimum just to get through them as quickly as possible (didn’t help much though, as Abby’s part still took around 10 hours to finish anyway).
I finally wrapped it up, and you were right, the last chapter didn’t help. Actually it made it worse somewhat. I hated that ending.
So after Ellie goes through this entire journey, with a body-count that would make Joel blush, and she just…lets Abby go?
It was so sudden and arbitrary. I get what they were going for, but it had no build-up to it whatsoever. She just has a flashback of Joel at the last moment (a moment, mind you, which came after she lost two fingers in a fight. This should drive anyone to a momentary insanity I would think.)
It was so strangely unfulfilling and empty. I’ve seen some folks defending it with the argument that you’re supposed to feel those things, like Ellie did. But I only felt that because of how badly done the ending was, not because I’m empathizing with Ellie.
Look, if you’re going to do a revenge tale properly, you only got two options: Have the character get revenge, or have them not get it but for a good reason. Don't make the character kill a whole lot of people (most of whom have nothing to do with your revenge, at all), just to let the object of your revenge just go at the end. If they wanted Ellie to forgive Abby for example, they could have done far better than that sudden, shoehorned Joel flashback. No closure or catharsis. It feels like you wasted your time instead. It’s like they wanted the whole “revenge doesn’t bring you peace” kind of feeling, but without the revenge itself. It’s contradictory and weird.
Safe to say this is one of my least favorite endings to a game. I haven’t felt like this since Mass Effect 3. Not a flattering comparison, to say the least.
I’m interested in how you think they could take a DLC from there, however.
To be honest, I don’t think even ND knew what it wanted to do with this game. So many potential themes are brought up, and just dropped. It’s like they changed the writing team a few times during the development.
I feel like they just coddled Lev too much. Like I said, even in the scene when Yara finds her mom’s body, all she’s concerned with is pointing out that Lev is “innocent”.
Maybe they were trying to mirror Joel and Ellie from the first game in Lev and Abby here, but if they were trying to have Lev be another Ellie, it didn’t quite work out.
I believe developers should move away from all the politics and just focus on telling good stories. If they’ve got ideas they want to share or groups to represent, they should do it in a way that’s naturally integrated into their work. Not just pandering or lecturing people on what they should think.
PS: I love how this article flat-out says that the TLOU2 controversy is "fueled by bigotry" towards certain groups. What a silly straw-man. People were pissed at the bad writing and execution, not because the game features certain groups, as far as I can tell.
Overall this ended up a 6/10 for me. I don’t regret the buy, but I don’t plan on getting another one of those if they end up making one. I also wouldn’t recommend it to anyone reading this who might be interested in getting it. I’d suggest waiting for a sale. The game’s worth the experience, but not at what they’re selling it right now.
Yeah, right at the moment you've been waiting for, they pull a switcheroo on you, and it takes a couple hours before you realize it ain't just another cutaway but you're in it for the long haul. To me the game never recovered that lost momentum, even when you return to that scene. Everything thereafter felt ragged and disjointed.
We could say the same of Abby in a sense. She lets Ellie live TWICE, even though she should have known that she will come for revenge later on. Actually, she also lets Tommy go despite knowing he was Joel’s brother (which was how she found Joel to begin with). Did it not occur to you that this will bite you in the ass later? I don’t get how these characters’ brains work.Even worse, she technically SAVED her life!
Exactly, Ellie didn't even get the one key revelation, the plot point the entire game is built on, which could have justifiably changed everything: that Abby's father was the surgeon performing the procedure on Ellie that Joel killed.
I can't believe this never comes up, that Ellie never asks why and nobody offers or says much of anything. This isn't a case of "show, don't tell" for the audience, it isn't subtext, we basically have to fill that in for ourselves too, this is total lack of curiosity or intelligence on the part of the characters, and dramatic malpractice after setting up a 25 hour story built around this information and then just letting it fade away into the ether to make... no point? I guess forgive people for no good reason because secretly there probably is one you just don't know about. Naughty Dog Quality!
Now that one I defended to the death; at least it said something, even if it wasn't that good. This one's like "choose your own head-canon," but of course it doesn't let you actually make a choice in the end. That would have been so much more meaningful given the content of the game, the themes and questions it raises and what your choice says about them and yourself. Oh well, wouldn't want that to spoil the integrity of all the nothing ND had to say.
In order of desire/potential:
1. Ellie's post-revenge life, which is shit and further illustrates what this cost her. This on its own would be boring and unessesary (so they'll definitely do that =), so what I really want is due to this, her PTSD and lack of closure, she goes back to kill Abby AGAIN and learns the truth about Abby's father and you get to kill her, or decide not to. Basically the ME3 extended cut ending fix. Not going to happen though.
2. What becomes of Abby and Lev as they go to find the Fireflies. Possible if not likely. Bonus if finding Ellie/the cure comes into play somehow, even just as an idea Abby shares. I mean, these characters have no closure about ANYTHING, so hopefully they're setting up a sequel because they sure didn't tell a satisfyingly complete story. Maybe the real theme of the game is disappointment. Nailed it.
3. Some fan service where you play as Joel: Joel & Tommy in the bad old days where you really see what a fucker he was, boring Joel doing mundane shit in Jackson (they'd love this), or Joel & Ellie forced on an adventure together where she first forgives him, because are we really supposed to believe they hadn't spoken about it for like a year until the night before he died? If so, we definitely should have explored that further because no wonder she couldn't let his death go, she would have felt guilty about shunning him until it was too late, which remembering would only give her more reason to kill Abby.
They choked under the pressure, they wanted to make some dark, gritty BS about the human condition that transcends to the meaning of life and if that sounds vaguely grandiose but muddled that's because it is. They took so many years to do this and it feels like a half-baked idea they didn't fully flesh out.
Well, none of these things are mutually exclusive, they can and should tell good politically relevant stories, some would argue any good story is political somehow ("everything is politics, especially the purportedly apolitical"), and there's definitely people hating it online just for its "woke" reputation as well as the plot being pretty questionable. It's basically getting it from all sides except the enthusiast gaming press that has financial interest in touting its bonafides as a transcendent gaming experience that shows how far the medium has come, blah blah blah. And to be fair, it's still good and that's at least arguably true in some regards.
A bit higher for me, a 7 or 8; it's still above most games out there, it just also has some frustrating aspects and doesn't live up to its predecessor or completely fulfill its own potential for the reasons I mentioned. If I replay it I'll see if it moves up minus expectations and if maybe I missed some things in my urgency to finish it that address some of my issues.
This is simply one of the prime examples of how ND failed to structure the whole thing, the other being Abby’s introduction and what she does to Joel. Neil Druckmann could have benefited from an editor for his story drafts and/or some proper feedback.
A lot of what happens in this game is simply placed at the wrong parts, and may have worked if at least these moments were earned.
We could say the same of Abby in a sense. She lets Ellie live TWICE, even though she should have known that she will come for revenge later on. Actually, she also lets Tommy go despite knowing he was Joel’s brother (which was how she found Joel to begin with). Did it not occur to you that this will bite you in the ass later? I don’t get how these characters’ brains work.
I was expecting that to come-up, all the way to the end. Just like I was expecting Ellie to explain to Abby why Joel did what he did. Maybe have the two get some mutual understanding before they fight or whatever.
I suppose. It has been 8 years since ME3 and I haven’t touched it again since, so maybe it isn’t as bad as I remember it. But I do recall feeling like the whole thing was a waste, with the choices you made and imported through saves not mattering in the end. Maybe it's time for a long overdue revisit?
I hope they won’t go for any DLC featuring Abby, as I think I’ve had about enough of her. If it helps set up a sequel that could at least repair some of the damage Part II did (God, I’m getting Disney Star Wars trilogy vibes here), then maybe. We’ll see.
The third option is basically the true sequel that we never got. But if they were to offer it on a DLC, I could go for that, provided they execute it well. After their current performance though, I don’t particularly have much confidence in them.
That’s the trend with developers nowadays (particularly western devs), this obsession with being profound and this needless anxiety to compete with other mediums. It’s so pretentious, like they’re forgetting they’re making games at the end of the day (I’m not saying games can’t or shouldn’t aim for depth, just that not every game has to make me question my universe and so on).
But who knows, the experience is still fresh in my head, so maybe returning to it after some time can make me appreciate it more.
I’m really, really looking forward to playing Half-Life 2. I hear it’s amazing.
Super Mario 64 was a life-changing event for me in 1996. My N64 arrived on Christmas Eve (my mom had a nervous breakdown about it potentially not arriving in time for Christmas), and Christmas Day was pure magic.
I also remember the game being much harder, but I’m breezing through it right now.
Wally was such a proselytizer of Half-life 2 he basically gifted me a copy to play! And it was/is amazing. Then you need to give Half-Life Alyx a whirl. {Look into my eyes)
You've been practicing on it 3D beneficiaries for 24 years since.