It's probably my cynicism coming through, but I am suspicious of the fact that there is a character/model hair that looks exactly like Abby except for the face. And they even got her signature red/black plaid button down combo in there as well. And shes made comments before about games not having hair like hers.
I wouldn't doubt that some version of the the publishers/devs-have-a-"folder"-on-everyone-in-the-industry still exists in some form. That they've heard her comments and deliberately have something in there for her. PR are extremely sensitive to subject matter around women these days of course.
Oh and it looks like another Forza Horizon game. Eh maybe I'll play it or maybe not. Doesn't look like anything significantly new here.
Now that I've listened to most of it, I think I'm not a fan of this. It's pretty much one person explaining how the whole game works. You can just watch some gameplay footage and get the basic gist. It's really slow and boring having someone essentially go down the old fashioned style list of Graphics, Sound, Gameplay etc and explain all of them. A lot of that is also subjective.
A Quick Look functions much more like a review for me. I can watch how the game looks, sounds, performs etc while listening to at least one person who has spent some time with it and voices their opinion so far. Having this separate audio/video one feels redundant.
I'd much rather they have an long postmortem discussion about the game. All of their opinions on it, section for spoiler discussion, and then general discussion like..
Where do they go from here with this game, if at all? Do they switch to a different super hero entirely? Should a different dev handle that? Do we want an Marvel Game Universe or is that just going to create the same problem in the game industry that the movies have now (every other movie is a super hero movie, and nothing else gets a budget.) Would it be better or worse to have a game where you play multiple super heroes through a story or something more open ended where you can pick from maybe 6 super heroes and switch around to whoever you want, whenever you want?
I think there is a lot to talk about around this game. But this discussion doesn't really go into any of that.
My suggestion is to ditch this review and instead do a long form open ended discussion.
This is a really solid game. I've put about 30 hours into it, three star-ing each level as I go.
There are three issues I have with it though:
The Copy/Paste feature (that is probably incoming) would be nice, but not because little things like a radiator. I'm sort of surprised Vinny is bothered by it so much, as you can kinda just guess where to stick them and be fine. It doesn't need to be perfect. The real issue is when you're trying to make a nice hospital (which, why wouldn't you want to build nice looking stuff?) and you're trying to fill every room with detail and objects for Prestige, Happiness, and because it just looks good. It can become a little dull redo-ing a room repeatedly and having to fill it with 50 objects.
The loop for each level is generally the same. They typically introduce a new room/mechanic with each one, but that means essentially building the same hospital over and over again from the ground up, using the same basic rooms to eventually reach the new room/mechanic. The building/plot layout does vary, and that actually affects the whole thing more than you'd think, plus they have stuff like the temperature or earthquakes etc for certain levels.
One issue is the whole GP/diagnosis process. As you start building bigger hospitals, you need a lot of GP offices because people seem to need to get diagnosed over and over again. You can curb this a bit by upgrading equipment and having better trained doctors, but it still feels a little disproportionate. The devs seem to be aware and are probably looking into adjusting it.
Other than that though, it's been pretty good. My last hospital, I did the bare minimum in pretty much every room and it was still running fairly well, so you don't have to do all the detail. But then you have an ugly hospital. Training isn't super critical, you can just kinda do it as you go, and as long as it seems to take, your whole hospital isn't going to fail even if you pull a couple people into training.
I do remember playing Theme Hospital when I was younger and enjoying it (and I'm american). If you're into the whole process of making nice looking and efficient layouts, designing and building something equivalent to a factory, then this is for you. There isn't much management stuff if you don't want to min/max the gameplay. It's very casual. Abby said she likes the look of it and wants to build a hospital, then she'd probably enjoy this game a bunch.
Here to voice my opinion that Auto Modellista was very arcade-y. Wasn't it actually an arcade game as well? Game would've been great if it weren't for the complete garbage arcade-y handling/gameplay.
Oddly enough, during this whole video I was sitting here messing with my PS2 organizing save files/memory cards and popped Auto Modellista in to check something.
Had to beat the weird audio dead horse. To me it has like a radio show sound. The tone/pitch/mix sound like I'm listening to a morning radio show like Free Beer & Hot Wings or 101.5 (whatever that main NJ/tri-state local news radio show is lol
Dammit. Yet another game I'm unsure if I'd like or not. I like the look of this and the sound/music seems real nice. "Feel" is something that is hard grasp through a video and I can't really remember ever using the Dpad for any 2D game like this.. I always just use the analog stick. Dead Cells on the other hand also looks nice, supposedly has this magical "feel" to it, yet it's in a format (run based thing) that I'm less interested in?
@tebbit: It seems pretty good. Most notable thing is the framerate of course which is real nice compared to some other PS1 racing games I've been playing. Music is decent, one particular song (DJ Sasha - Xpander) I immediately recognized and have had in my MP3 collection forever now, yet had no idea when or where it was from.
I was happy and surprised to see you could disable weapons and checkpoints in the options, turning it into a pure racing experience. Some of the finer menu details, like the vehicle stats, are impossible to read even with my decent CRT TV. Widescreen support if you wanted to try that.
Also slightly taken back by the lack of general.. stuff to do? Which is a theme I'm seeing across most racing games from the era. I guess as a kid very little can go a long way, but these days I'm so accustomed to progression systems, that on the surface it can look somewhat thin. I'm guessing there is more to do here than it appears at first glance. Only four vehicles with 5-6 tracks as far as I can tell. Ramping the difficulty up mostly involves me constantly slamming into the walls on tight corners due to increased speeds and I don't know how anyone is supposed to take those turns. The shoulder buttons function more as drift controls, making it feel even looser, and less as actual air brakes to help with cornering.
Overall, pretty cool and I'm glad I picked it up. I've got a thing for collecting racing games and this series certainly deserves to be in it. I haven't looked it up but I'm curious if they made one for PS2.
As someone who just picked up Wipeout 3 for PS1 a week ago and experienced that for the first time, I'd be happy to take those Wipeout games off your hands. Honestly think it'd be nice if there was some kind of home-for-wayward-games thread on the forum (maybe for premium members only?) where people could send stuff if they are looking to get rid of it. Lots of stuff they get on here I would love to have in my collection. Not sure what they do with it all.
And the words "Star Trek" and "Klingon" were said yet Brad was completely unfazed and unflinching, clearly deep in the zone.
@ripelivejam My Klipsh Pro Medias (made famous by Vinny) are very loud even with the knob at like 20%. I typically have to watch GB (generally any internet video) content with the video player slider at ~50%. I had to max it for this and I could still barely hear it lol Not that big of a deal though.
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