Nodima

Normally I'd say something like I look forward to taking these first two months of 2024 to check out some of your lower picks. Primarily Venba and Jusant - unfortunately, I've only got a couple weeks until I (imagine I) spend way too much time with Last of Us II's rogue mode and then lose the rest of my snowy days to Ichiban's Hawaiian adventures... though if I could just appreciate my Switch one more time Mario RPG'd be the game I actually regret ignoring most. But I can't even compel myself to buy Mario Odyssey, let alone Wonder, so...crap!

Like I said in my own little post I love how much people have loved the last two Zelda games, and what I didn't say is that I only own a Switch because of them. Though I also bought the first Mario + Rabbids for whatever reason, I mostly think of it as my far too fancy Vampire Survivors provider.

I often feel like I come down too hard on game stories I enjoy so I won't harp on it, but as much as I also loved Spider-Man I felt like the acting slipped a bit from the first one. Or maybe it was just the tone? To that end, I did play until a bit past the prison break in the PS5 remaster just before release and...I swear I'm not one of those guys...the new Peter was and remains bizarrely blasé to me. But as I said and you say - oh well! Swing fun, punch fun, game great.

Having not played as many games as you did, and generally preferring the big spectacles that seem to be driving the studios that produce them increasingly mad, I am curious if FFXVI ranks so high for you primarily because it put money on the screen. Not a criticism! I just found that I most enjoyed that game, especially in the latter half (which was, what...25 hours long...) when it was not doing the big dumb thing. They were paced just right, and I agree with what seems like just about everybody who finished the game that Bahamut stole the show...but Titan also kinda ruined it, both because it was so impossibly God of War III-type huge and, to my mind anyway, was a total disaster of an experience.

Last comment is that I keep feeling the urge to download Sea of Stars, especially because it's still included in PS+, but I can't push the (mostly very strong) criticisms I've heard regarding its writing/English translation far enough aside to do it.

Indoctrination Theory from Mass Effect is the only one I ever took seriously because it sounded very plausible that it was just somehow written around or forgotten about in the rush to get ME3 out the door.

Like ZombiePie, Squall Is Dead is fascinating to me, though I don't agree with it in the end.

Don't have any knowledge of Japanese wrestling other than the handful of guys I know made names for themselves over there before or in between WCW/WWF runs. Also fell off wrestling incredibly hard right around the time Scorpion King came out and a lot of the new crop seemed to be just First Name Last Name guys.

Given that context, obviously Austin and Rock would be on this, but I wanna be A Guy so here's four people I always begged for the PPV if they were on (which, ironically, only one wasn't a Name Guy):

Chris Jericho

Mick Foley, any version

Scott Hall

Goldberg

Honorable Mention, Always Picked His Moveset in the AKI Games: Kanyon/Mortis

Finally trying to return to this because of all the "well obviously Baldur's Gate 3 is the best game ever" talk across my various podcasts. Hell, even my sister whom I'd convinced to give the game a shot while I was on the hype train only to find its turn-based combat incredibly off-putting has *checks notes* sunk 220 hours into the game since making that comment. Meanwhile I've got 37 hours across two saves, one 24 and the other 10 in which I accomplished everything from the first save in half the time apparently...

Dropped the first save because I made some decision I think I mentioned elsewhere here that had me siding with the goblins and basically cut everyone out of my party but one or two people, which I thought was funny until I realized I didn't like using the other characters in combat at all.

This second save is on Explorer difficulty and I'm still finding the combat weirdly difficult because of the limits on magic uses, how far away the enemies always are at the start and how much stronger they are than you, even on easy. I'm about to advance past the first area for the first time, into the Moonrise thing, and my main goal is to figure out how to stop playing this game like it's an XCOM reskin...Everybody keeps blathering on about how infinite the game feels, but I haven't got any memory of the game feeling any more complex than Cyberpunk's or Dishonored's "fumble around in stealth until you do something dumb then kill everyone that's mad at you" binary.

...Which of course means it's all my fault, probably, but...*fingers crossed*

Curious how the tone of this thread has held up. As I said in the Black Friday thread, I held true to my promise earlier in this thread that I'd wait for a sale because of the impression the demo gave me...only to then hold out a day too long and grin-and-bare the full price.

Turns out I think this game is fuckin' rad. It reminds me of many other amazing games, but more than anything like FF7R I'm really enjoying how often I'm thinking about what the game used to be vs. what it is, and whether it's actually any different or tricks are being played on me. Hell, I'm simple enough that I was charmed by the brief homage to God of War '18, as simple as it was.

I'm also pretty stoked on how propulsive this game is; what I saw and read about its "side quests" and whatnot made me worry if the game was filled with busy work to seem more modern, but no, each chapter is about an hour long, sometimes half an hour or less, and that brisk feeling is wild in 2023.

Lastly, I do hate that the game is clearly scarier, and more difficult, than it was. Between this and Alan Wake 2 I've got a lot of personal inventory to do regarding how much more of a gaming wimp I've become twenty years since survival horror was a genre du jour, but every 20 minutes or so I find myself wanting to play anything else just so I'm not so stressed out. Having said that, I also then soldier on and realize, no, I'm just gonna dump munitions into plague-ridden villagers same as I ever did.

Also, I did tap out of the original RE4 shortly after my original post in this thread. Didn't even make it into the church. It pains me a little to admit it but I'm just not nostalgic enough, or gamer enough, to sit in the sort of middle distance that game lingers. By that same token, as much as I understand all the complaints about the various cosmetic/aesthetic choices regarding Leon's behavior in this game...I'll always be the guy that thinks GTAV and Red Dead II are two of the most engaging avatar experiences video games have to offer, so clearly I want animation priority over "responsiveness". If the lighting and enemy behavior remove some of the original's comedy, Leon's clumsiness offers the same from another angle, plus I find the dodge mechanic nearly as impressive as Last of Us Part II's, in that the spaces all feel very tangible.

Which is funny, and admirable, considering so much of this game is Video Game Personified©. Hell, you get bonus points for punching gravestones!

I waited until the day after the PSN Black Friday sale and then finally bought Resident Evil 4 at full price instead of $20 off. I also kept putting off taking my tips to the bank so I could cover my annual January trip to New Orleans and missed the hotel I like's 40% sale so I won't be going this year.

I did put in a Go Puff order for some Lagunitas All Day IPA last night and bit on the 50% off offer for a year of Peacock Premium for just $30 (I'd canceled Netflix, Hulu and Apple+ just last month) so I guess I have that going for me.

I killed it this Black Friday.

Now that I finished and have been digging into some behind the scenes stuff, one of the more stunning accomplishments of this game is how seamlessly they integrated the original voice actor (Darling from Control) into all the FMV footage.

If I hadn’t known that tidbit from post-Control curiosity, or ever heard the actor who plays Wake speak, I’d never suspect that 100% of the filmed Wake scenes were entirely ADR synced to his performance. Eventually I presumed the two actors simply had mastered a similar tone and cadence, but it’s all one face paired with another voice the whole way through.

Of course, games have been pairing voice actors to facial models for a generation or more at this point, but adding the soundstage ADR element to it significantly raises the stakes as this has always been one of the most immediately obvious post-production edits throughout film history and here it’s absolutely seamless.

What shines an even brighter light on how bold that is is that (while it also adds to the mystery of the story) Sam Lake and … sorry, don’t want to open a new tab on my phone … Max Payne aren’t ever matched like that. Even if they have the technology or expertise to pull it off…I can’t imagine it being anywhere near as invisible as the Wake magic.

What little I know about Booty comes from the various times he came up in anecdotes from Giant Bomb staff over the years, some E3 @ Nite appearances and his late cameos in the PsychOdyssey documentary, but with that cursory impression of the guy he seems like the real deal as far as a liason between developers and publishers. While, much like Phil Spencer, it's plenty appropriate to attach some "yeah but management/executive" buffers to his public image, but from the outside looking in Booty seems like somebody any studio would want input and guidance from.

As a total "please don't scare me bro", I'd say the horror is generally at a Resident Evil level. It's mostly driven by lighting, level design, art direction and sound while the game itself is more of an exploration/action game. The Last of Us is another comparison I've probably already made in this thread, in that the game can be quite tense at times but the game itself is built around you stamping out that tension, not bathing in it like a straight up horror game.

It's got some wall-busting jump scares, and I'll admit the FMV jumps splodge mentioned get me every damn time (sometimes I take the headphones off for an hour or so just to add a layer of remove) but especially if you decide to play on Story difficulty like me there's not much to be afraid of. Because I'm a total wimp that doesn't mean I'm not still wrecking the shit out of my shoulder muscles from tension, especially in the Wake sections (the character skill sets are sort of an Ellie/Abby scenario, where Anderson is a trained combatant and Wake is scrambling around ghosts making due with what he's got)

But again, like a RE2 or 4, it's way more about my mental hurdles than the gameplay. And the Wake story also rewards all that tension with all the Remedy jazz you want, whereas Saga's side is more straightforward. So even if you find yourself dreading a Wake level, you also never know when it's going to blindside you with something completely left field. Which goes back to my most recent post, this game is a genuine pinnacle of pacing in games, in that the levels get more focused alongside the story but they also seem aware that fans of Control (or just big story-focused third person action games in general) are only gonna tolerate so much terror before they need a release.

Edit: Before basically just repeating myself to echo later comments, I do want to mention that I love how thoughtful the back end of the game's pacing seems to be. Without saying much about why, a lot of the Parts in each Chapter quickly become more and more like pageturner-style writing, with some of them ending almost as soon as you start them. Some of the levels are also really mindful of what's already gone on there, and unlike some other Remedy games, or really most action games like this, they don't always try to shove more combat into an area or story beat that doesn't really require it.

As outlandish and Going for It as much of this game is, a lot of that stuff works as well as it does in part because the game also shows remarkable restraint. It's some truly confident art we're dealing with here.

I thought Control was awesome all the way through and played it on a harder difficulty. The only boss that gave me ulcers was Tomassi, the flying witch man you could meet pretty early on in the game but was notoriously difficult to beat even with a fully leveled, endgame Jesse.

And like I said before, in regular gameplay this game basically feels just like Resident Evil 2. Hell, the inventory menu is a direct design reference. But the boss design doesn't get much more forgiving - playing on Story, I died the first time I fought each of Saga's subsequent bosses because they still tank like crazy and just take you out in 4 or 5 hits instead of 2 or 3.

There's something off in the balance between getting hurt and healing, they always seem to encroach on your retreat just as the heal animation is finishing, and they've all got ways of hurting you when you aren't looking that can be quite relentless (particularly the Coffee World boss, which basically takes everything about the Nightingale fight and amplifies it).

Likewise, I'm not sure if I'm just too impatient to learn the stealth mechanics, whatever they may be, or if the apparitions' warp abilities make me uncurious in spending most of this game with a tail on me, but again even with a fully leveled up flashlight and revolver by the end of most levels Alan feels dangerously close to being out of charges, which obviously is part of the game design but feels incongruous with the idea of "Story" and makes me wonder how it'd feel on Normal where you probably can't zap literally everything.

I'm sure many, many people are gonna love this game's combat all the way through, but now that I'm pretty near the end of the game I think (chapter 7 for Alan, 6 or 7 for Saga) I just can't see how anybody would want the action portion of this game to even threaten getting in the way of narrative progress. It feels 10% too harsh, the way kicking the newer God of Wars up a notch can instantly phase the game out of a moderately challenging power fantasy into a getting-your-ass-kicked seminar.