asylumrunner

@daavpuke: I would argue that what you're describing is Normie Coffee. Hipster coffee is single-origin hand-ground beans run through a V60 with custom papers and gently sipped after checking the strength with a refractometer, while publicly executing anyone who dare enter the same room as your cup of coffee with a carton of milk.

(I like Hipster coffee, btw ;) )

@kcin: gonna go ahead and answer this for them: Varg is, like, a capital-N Nazi, not even a "it's 2020 and we call every right-winger on twitter a Nazi" Nazi, but like a regular Nazi, so no, probably not lol

People here are very hostile to the Royal Family, but I think people forget how much genuine good the Royal Family does. Heck, Elizabeth's second son was known for abandoning royal processions to help schoolkids cross the street on the way to class, you can just Google "Prince Andrew child traffic" and see for yourself.

This is a joke sic semper tyrannis

welp lmao

@kamakazie: It's six!
Yakuza 0

Mass Effect

The Missing: J.J Macfield and the Island of Lost Dreams

Death Stranding

Psychonauts 2

Disco Elysium

The blind girl's the one who's owned the thing the whole time.
That statue you've been walking past the whole time is a teleportation device
It's all a hallucination, you're being resuscitated after a major hemorrhage, and you're trans
Your sister is your mom (but is actually neither) and is also the end of the world
It's your grandma, who was also your teacher's girlfriend
The bug was real, it's been real the whole time

@onemanarmyy: This comment hammers home how hard a time I have thinking about games as generations anymore. Are It Takes Two, Inscryption, and Disco Elysium 8th generation IPs? All three of them only came to consoles once the ninth generation consoles were out. But also Disco came out before the ninth generation consoles came out? Do games that were in early access in the 8th gen but reached 1.0 in the 9th count as 8th or 9th?

Arbitrarily declaring the 8th gen to end at November 10th, 2020, here are the big standouts for me:

• Titanfall
• The Evil Within
• Outer Wilds
• Death Stranding
• Control

This is a Business Dave Appreciation Thread, wherever Business Dave is upon this Barren Earth, let him know that he is missed and loved, and I hope he is experiencing life to its fullest, ideally in such a way that it can be organized in Top 10 Format

It feels... off?

It's 100% Left 4 Dead, all of the bits are there, but it's missing all of the charm. The characters feel like complete nothing, despite how much writing there is here, and I can't help but find it sort of ironic that there's probably like double the character writing in B4B than there is in either L4D, but the 8 L4D survivors are all, like, iconic, memorable characters, whereas I played some B4B like an hour ago and the only character name I can remember is "Mom". All of them are just so nothing.

I'm admittedly not too too far into the campaign so far, but that lack of charm extends to all of the game. L4D's levels are memorable, charming, they all sort of have a schtick going on: No Mercy is a hospital, Dead Air is an airport, Dark Carnival is an amusement park, Hard Rain is New Orleans during a monsoon. The first levels of B4B are... astonishingly boring. It's some woods! I guess! And a bridge! Like the one from The Parish, but worse!

(also, to get it out of the way, I know Turtle Rock didn't do L4D2, but that game came out a decade ago, and I don't feel bad about using it as a point of comparison here because there has been ample time and feedback to use to pull that game's best ideas into B4B)

The infected, too. They're all very boring to look at, some of them are really hard to distinguish from each other ($20 to anyone who can identify the difference between a Retch, a Reeker, and an Exploder at 100 feet, visually). The L4D infected are great: you can recognize them all from a distance, they are visually distinct from the horde, and they all have clear functionality: Chargers charge, Hunters leap, Tanks are Big, Boomers puke, Spitters spit, Jockeys jockey. The B4B special infected feel like weird, badly done knock-offs of the L4D infected. The big arm thing is kinda like a Charger, but it doesn't charge and takes too much damage to kill. The weird... wall.. things? are Hunters, but way less scary because you see them coming a mile away. There are like 3 or 4 enemies that are in my brain as "Just A Tank But With More Pointy Bits".

The additions here, namely the card system and the weapon attachments, also so far feel like total nothing. I just cannot be bothered to ever give a shit about incremental percentile bonuses in video games, which seems like both of these systems are almost entirely composed of, and I just cannot be bothered to care enough to meticulously craft a deck or care about getting new cards.

It's kind of just nothing. It's too close to L4D for me to appreciate it as its own thing, but its way less charming than L4D or, I dunno, elegant in its design? for me to appreciate it as a L4D3. Of all of the not-Left 4 Deads, I think Vermintide is still the best of the lot, and of all of the L4Ds-and-not-L4Ds, L4D2 is still undefeated.

Section 8 Prejudice, man.

For being a budget multiplayer title, Section 8 Prejudice (and the original Section 8 but that game is slightly worse) feels like it was chock full of intelligent decisions that I'm surprised more big-map multiplayer shooters like Battlefield and the big Halo gametypes haven't picked up.

For starters, literally just respawning into the map is fun, because you HALO dive into the map. Bases on the map have AA turrets which will prevent enemies from dropping directly into your base, and you can also spend currency earned over the course of the match to build your own AA turrets, which can shape the course of the match as people change where they spawn to avoid, you know, being shot out of the sky. Ground forces can take out AA turrets, which is usually a pivotal step in taking an enemy base, or you can spec your loadout with perks that let you tank AA fire, letting you land deep in enemy territory (admittedly, deeply damaged, meaning anyone who watches you land can immediately pick you off if you don't find cover).

Next! Classic problem of big map MP games: I'm over here, and the most interesting thing is alllllllll the way over there. Are you by a vehicle? Great, guess you can slog it over there. If not, enjoy a 10 minute boring-ass walk. Section 8 solves this simply and beautifully: everyone can run really fast. Like, really really fast. It requires a bit of wind-up, so you aren't trying to hit people moving at The Flash speeds in firefights, but you can easily cross the map in a minute or two, meaning you can be anywhere the action is pretty fast.

The other thing I really love about S8P is that, on top of the normal Domination, base-capture, ticket-draining sort of default gameplay, the game sporadically introduces mini-objectives into the match, essentially minigames that will give bonuses for the winning team in the main game. These are selected randomly from a list, and run the gamut from "one team must try to kill every member of the other team in a set time period", "plant an airstrike beacon and defend it in an enemy base until the airstrike obliterates every structure in the base", to "protect this mobile forward operating base from the enemy team". These add a fun bit of variety to the missions, keeping things feeling constantly fresh, but they're also optional, so you can slink away while most of the game focuses on them, perhaps taking a base when no one's looking.

It's basically unplayable now, the servers are barren and I think it's still GFWL, so it's essentially dead, but I miss it so much.