sweetz

Ok I just wanted to make that pun, I'll see myself out :)

On a serious note, I am curious to see what's up with No Man's Sky these days and I think both Vinny and Brad have threatened to revisit it on several occasions

I got this on sale and just just finished it. I enjoyed it, but definitely thought it was a bit over hyped. That said, I tend to approach games from a more "mechanical" perspective; can't say I've ever really been into any game's story or lore.

Here's what I posted as a review on Steam:

It's basically Antichamber with a story. The whole point of the game is to slowly teach you a ruleset for interacting with a few elements in the game world with non-obvious mechanics, which you need to know how to use in order to essentially solve a single (multi-step) puzzle to end the game. You could finish the game in 15 minutes if you went in with the requisite knowledge. It is interesting as a concept that the only ability gained is your knowledge as a player, but I thought it ultimately felt a little thin and could have done with at least a little bit of more traditional video game progression of some flavor.

The game is based on a 22 minute long loop during which scripted events in the game world occur the same way every time. After 22 minutes the game resets and there are no real shortcuts to be unlocked. You may find a slightly more efficient path to get where you need to go, but you still must manually traverse there each time, leading to quite a lot of repetition in traveling to places until they are fully explored, which I found fairly annoying. The game does justify this loop (both in terms of gameplay and narrative), but I think they could have easily made it 30-40 minutes instead of 22 without detrimental effect. The current, relatively short time limit feels like it's there to force frequent repetition and pad out the average game completion time. Not a good reason.

The story is mostly in service to the gameplay. It's predominantly delivered via the literal writings on the wall of a precursor race that were on a big McGuffin chase, the purpose of which are simply to set the player on the same McGuffin chase. It's a engaging as a clue hunt, but I can't say the story is engaging by itself.

On the positive side, I do like the game's style and what they've done with relatively simply graphics. The ship log mechanic is absolutely essential and extremely well implemented; best implementation I've ever seen for this type of game in fact. As said, the clue hunt is engaging and clever...I just wish finding each clue wasn't preceded by so much repetition.

I'd be super curious to see Castlevania 64, as long as Vinny was playing it through emulation. It was hard enough to look at their composite output capture of Mario Sunshine before they got the HDMI adapter. I don't want to look at the interlaced, low res output of a real N64.

@sethmode: Jeff makes content that is really not represented elsewhere on the site, specifically his old games stuff, which was one of my favorite features. He also has knowledge and skill with games that exceeds that of other members of the staff. He can do goofy overlays, but the flashing stuff is just not worth it for the dumb joke. I honestly cannot comprehend how anyone isn't driven absolutely nuts by constantly flashing gun lady. Toning some of that stuff down is not an unreasonable request.

Static overlays are fine, but the lady holding a gun with the flashing green sunglasses that he's been using in all his streams makes them absolutely unwatchable for me unless I'm on PC where I can resize the browser window and cut off the top portion of the video.

Regarding the " it's only a minority who hate it" sentiment, is having having flashing shit in the overlay really so funny or bring so much enjoyment to other people that it's a hill worth dying on, as Jeff himself might say? If it makes his videos uncomfortable to watch to any portion of GB's paying audience, are the overlays honestly worth keeping?

There are things where it absolutely is worth annoying some portion of the audience to keep around for the people who do like it, but I really can't imagine this is one of them.

I mean I'm not a fan of Jeff's spamming the soundboard either, but you can skip over that. Gun lady is up there in the corner flashing away for the entire video. Imagine trying to listen to an audio book with a fire alarm going off for the entire duration. That's what his animated overlays are like for people who very easily visually key into motion and flashing things.

Hmm I can only remember one "platforming under duress" segment which is the chase sequence on the giant tree on Kashyyyk that involved a bunch of sliding. I do think I had maybe one instance there where I didn't realize the slide was ending and missed a jump, but that's it. I really dig Uncharted, Tomb Raider, etc. style games so maybe I'm just more clued into the "tells". Die far more frequently from combat than platforming in those games. Assassin's Creed games are the only ones that drive me nuts and there it's more when you have to chase someone (or a damn collectible...looking at you Black Flag Pirate Shanties) than you are being chased.

FWIW I played on PS4 Pro with an SSD which pretty much eliminated any hitches that can interfere with the stuff. If the game was constantly hitching mid-transition, I'd probably feel differently.

I really didn't have any problems with the platforming in this game or Uncharted for that matter. Maybe your stick fidelity is bad. Assassin's Creed is the only series where I find the character jumping in directions I didn't intend.

Agree about wishing there was more to the locations than just enemies, but I'm pretty sure that's a factor of the development time frame. The few characters that are in it are well written and really well acted. I'll take them over dozens of filler NPCs any day.

"Fair assessment" doesn't matter as the actual ranking is a joke and it's just a fun series to look at fighting games. However, having everything unlocked does make the games more interesting and entertaining to watch, so to that end: yes, if it's reasonably easy for them to use cheat codes or save files to unlock everything, they should.

I finished Dark Souls 3 last night. I still like it better than DS2, but not as much as DS1.

Maybe my memory of DS1 is skewed, but in DS3 it seems like getting from boss to boss, at least in the base game, is far more difficult than the actual bosses, and I don't remember DS1 being like that. In DS3 there are quite a few bosses that I beat on the first try. I died far more navigating through the areas. It feels weird in a game that people naturally associate with boss battles that wading through the regular enemies was, at least for me, the much more difficult and frustrating aspect of the game.

In spite of that, I was enjoying it quite a bit, but then I played the DLCs and they are both obnoxiously, punishingly difficult in terms of both regular enemies and the bosses. Struggling through them almost undid all the good will built up from the base game.

Lastly, I still can't stress enough how much I hate the invasion aspect of these games. By the very nature of what it is, the people who invade are pretty much guaranteed to be better than you at the game. It's like, "Hey need a random reminder that you suck? Here you go, have some asshole to screw up your progress!" I know I could play offline, but the world messages are really an important part of the atmosphere Dark Souls. I wish there was a mode that allowed world messages only (and NPC co-op and invaders); giving up access to human co-op summons could be the trade off for not having human invaders.

I guess the early game stands out more in my memory than the late game, which makes sense because I had a very tough time in the early game. I remember burning through estus flasks very quickly and being worried about using up the gems. Early game is tough in DS3 too, but they start handing out the additional flasks pretty quickly.

Also I know you lose a portion of health when not "embered" in DS3, but don't you eventually get down to 50% health in DS2 vs a flat 30% reduction in DS3? Even though you take a bigger up front hit in DS3, it somehow feels less punishing than taking a hit every time you die in DS2.