Sam Stranding's Dad 最近的评测

i'm more of a scifi guy than a history guy, but one thing that makes normal civ work is that when you look at the research tree and see a node called "tank," you already know what a tank does. you just kinda by default understand that a tank is a treaded armored vehicle that has a big gun. when you look at the research tree in beyond earth and see "nanohive," you don't really have a sense of what that means for your game. so you're stuck trying to parse the already-opaque long list of traits and skills and requirements when you hover over the nanohive research node, which was already rough in regular civ but nearly impenetrable in beyond earth now that everything is funny make'em'up words.

i was so excited for this one but my eyes glazed over when i realized i'd need to learn a new language to have any hope of progression. i've never been good at "winning" at civ, i always just like building everything out, and that's difficult in this one with any sort of purpose or forethought.

this was a charming thing, clearly inspired by the world and premise of half-life 2, particularly viktor antonov's visual design. it's quite clunky in parts: the robots don't know how to maneuver around physics objects (which makes the fact that they're put behind physics objects on purpose several times very funny), the ammo is often not around when you need it but Everywhere when you're already full up, exacerbated by the very very small ammo pools.

they clearly have some ideas for their story and world that they didn't fully implement into this game, and unfortunately what that leaves you with is some entirely out-of-context segments that effectively mean nothing to the player. you walk through a brutalist library and a theater a few times, the theater shows simple silent plays that seem to relate to the wider story, then sometimes you see a big guy walking out in the skybox, but nora comments on none of it save for mentioning dreams at the very beginning, leaving me to wonder if it's just something the player sees. outside of the gman-style ending, and only barely so in it, there is no context to get me more excited to see what comes next. just a big tall guy walkin around, apparently invisible.

one bug i encountered was that at least three note pickups were just inaccessible - the pickup prompt never appeared no matter how close or far i was away from them. that means i may have missed important plot stuff, but the rest of the notes were about people in this alternate world dealing with robots rather than anything directly tied to the main plot.

overall i had a good time, the relationship between nora and brent was quite sweet towards the end. i hope that this upcoming sequel manages to progress the plot Much further and flesh out what the actual big conflict is between walter/nora/atlas/whatever the librarians are, and tie in the abstract elements into the actual story. I also hope it will have more consistent use of mechanics - for example, the inventory system barely comes into play at all after the rust remover segment very early on, and the translations when you hover over German text disappears midway through the game.

absolutely awesome. in hexen especially, the inclusion of map icons for goals keeps the game going rather than so much time getting stuck running in circles figuring out which button opened what.

i also love the cleric's parry mechanic. i don't care if it's not accurate to the original, the cleric needed something to stand out.

absolutely loving these old game re-releases by id and nightdive, keep it coming!

the old metal gears finally being released on the personal computer system means i can finally play them. i played the master collection version of 3 last year, so i got to experience both the (hd collection) original and this version with, i think, pretty darn fresh eyes, and the verdict is that this game kicks ass. it's really hard for any media to hit the perfect level of camp, effectively balancing the funniest and most comically badass things you've ever seen, but kojima has a career of, with some glaring exceptions (quiet from metal gear solid v), nailing that balance.

complaints are relatively minor. one is that a lot of characters' eyes have been moved up and spaced out in a weird way. i get wanting to stylize since it's really really hard to make believable humans even at games' current level of fidelity, but especially eva, the boss, and ocelot look like aliens now. people have even made mods that re-rigged character models to look less like they came from space, but i've chafed against installing them because they feel too adjacent to the deranged "FIX this WOMANS APPEARANCE" chuds everywhere online that creep me out.

the second complaint is that, while the updated control system is Extremely welcome, konami nerfed the mk22 tranquilizer gun by making it *exceptionally* inaccurate, with absurd bullet drop on top. i get the arguments for balance, to make non-lethal a riskier way to play, but i'd rather a balance change be something the player can more reliably adapt to with skill or patience, rather than just making the gun randomly shoot 3 feet off to the left half the time. games have a long history of trying to implement things like this: deus ex had its very wide targeting reticles that could be either made smaller with skill points or helped with a laser sight, and morrowind tried to implement dice rolls into its melee attacks that resulted in new players giving up after waving a sword at a beetle for 5 minutes with no damage being done either way. there's no way to improve or really adapt around the tranq guin in MGDelta, which mostly serves to encourage restarting the current map if your shots refuse to hit their target. there's a mod to try and fix this too which i haven't tried.

i emulated metal gear solid 4 because i just needed to see how the story ends, but it ran so poorly that i had to play it on the easiest difficulty to get through. i'm excited for the release this summer so i can truly say i've played every metal gear solid video game

i love infra and i want to love obenseuer. i hope it'll be great when it's finally done. right now, it's really irritating to play due to the simple fact that the interiors aren't seamless, and load times are frequent and way too long. i understand wanting to split up the interiors and overworld for performance reasons, especially since the original incarnation of the game had trouble running without FPS drops, but i immediately found myself dreading going anywhere because the time it takes to load maps, especially the overworld, is waaaay too long even on an SSD. i'm not sure what engine this is running on where this is necessary, but the load times really add up quite quickly because the entire game involves going in and out of lots of buildings all the time.

ideally the whole world would be seamless, but i think at least the load times need to somehow become far less obnoxious. in infra you could spend hours in one map exploring every room of a large facility (the old steel plant stands out as being an exceptionally massive map especially for a source engine game), but obenseuer's world is pretty small and the constant load times make it hard to want to commit to play more. i want to feel like i'm exploring a small city, not queuing up to wait 20 seconds to go into the next room.

i do however really appreciate the addition of a casual mode and specific options for different aspects of difficulty! you can make the game easier or even harder in basically whatever way you want, so you can play without mechanics you don't like or make things even more challenging.

everything about obenseuer's new version is gorgeous and charming, but way too much of it is load screens.

i'm slowly replaying la noire again and i'm remembering some stuff. i'm remembering that the presentation is just a perfect level of camp, the acting is so funny to watch, and that it accurately portrays most cops as horrible people. i tried to roleplay cole as a real cop so drove erratically and into other people as much as i could, but my roleplay was severely stifled in that i couldn't draw a gun on literally every person i talked to.

i'm also remembering that the interrogation "truth/doubt/lie" mechanic is the most frustrating "guess what the developer was thinking" mechanic i've seen since sierra adventure games in the 90s.

one memorable scenario: i'm questioning a woman inside her home. i just got done walking around the house looking for clues, and one notable interactible is a pair of wet rainboots indoors, as if someone went out in the rain. one of the questions was to ask the lady if anybody went outside while it was raining, and she said no. i've got her dead to rights, i thought, this is a lie and i can prove it. when i hit lie, cole automatically goes "oh yeah? why are there WET rainboots INDOORS?" and then the game prompts me to pick *another* piece of evidence. i didn't know what the hell else i could need or find, and whatever i picked triggered that truly infuriating piano cue for when you get it wrong. i very rarely get out-and-out angry at video games, but that cue made me ragequit.

the thing where you have to decide whether cole might have evidence or just wants to browbeat them into telling the truth is so opaque and infuriating. if it would tell me what cole was actually going to say when i hit doubt or lie, that would make a lot of sense. as it stands, it's a guessing game because cole is an absolute psychopath who will jump between a calm demeanor and loudly accusing people of child abuse within 30 seconds. even when played perfectly, he'll catch a person in 3 different lies then go "thank you for your help"

i just wanna look at the funny faces and the untouchable performances. i'm playing this time with a guide (and using all my intuition points on revealing clues) and finding a lot to like, and you should too, but make sure to download the inscrutably-named V-Patch for the game so it uncaps the framerate and fixes a lot of bugs related to framerate: https://github.com/VaanaCZ/LANVP

it's got the sand and scarves and wall tiles from journey, and it's got the water and fish and blue chains from abzu, and it's got the faceless masked protagonist making a vaguely-defined journey to activate a magic light left floating around by a precursor civilization from journey and abzu. this one also has readable text, but the text is still about how the precursor civilization fell because of war or arrogance or both, there's not really actual story here other than the story told through the gameplay itself. but again, that's nothing new, because this is just journey again.

the skating/surfing alone makes this the most fun feeling One of These games to play, and this studio is certainly still the top dog of these types of games (many of the journey copycats have been embarrassing in their own ways), but gosh golly i'd really like to see giant squid do something truly new. pathless was a step in the right direction, now it's back to journey. do not pick this up unless you want journey 3: abzu 2: but surfing

one more note about the skating: you don't have to mash a button to push yourself forward. most skating games cause me actual pain because of this so i am very happy to be able to zip around without my hand aching

i played this through on ps5 and am very happy to start my playthrough on pc.

death stranding is one of my favorite games ever, i've played through its different versions and platforms at least 8 times, and i love this sequel even more. the act of playing is joyous, even though the story is often quite sad.

if you thought death stranding 1 didn't bring in enough of the fun stuff from metal gear solid v, hoo boy you're in for a treat, in terms of both new tools and mechanics that would feel right at home in mgsv, and tools and mechanics that literally were in mgsv.

two of the best things this game did were actually remove mechanics from ds1, and they ended up making the game way more fun. first, BTs do not only show up when you stand still, you can now just see them at any time once you're close enough. second, and imo this is even better, they removed the automatic detection sensor poles from around enemy camps. this makes both stealth and combat a lot more fun and viable, since you're not ever immediately detected when you enter enemy camps (the original game had a tool to possibly negate the detection but it had very tricky timing).

with all this, new and returning tools/abilities have much more use, especially against humans. take your time setting up a jump ramp to do the longest no-self-damage dropkick ever conceived, and then go pizza mode by spinning the nearest enemy around in the air like dough.

if you're like me and loved death stranding 1 for its quiet moments and vibes out in the wilderness, you get tons of that too. i'm not usually a fan of day/night cycles in games because video game nighttime usually just ends up being "day but blue" with far less interesting lighting, so i was concerned when they added it to ds2 as well, but it works really well. it can still be pretty blue, but player structures giving off a bit of light can make some beautiful vistas, little marks of everyone's passage serving as little landmarks. night time even gives an opportunity for sleep, which is a bit more important here than in the first game:

stamina goes down far faster in this at normal difficulty than it did in the original, being more akin to the hard or very hard difficulty in ds1, though still perfectly manageable even if you're not playing "optimally" and like to goof around. it's really not bad at all. i personally love this change, but i can see why some wouldn't - i'm not a person that demands difficulty in games, but it was very hard to run out of stamina in normal mode in ds1, and now you have to be a bit more strategic. if that sounds to you like a bad change, you should know that this is mitigated in a couple ways: first is that you nearly always have a bed nearby thanks to your cool yucky mobile base that follows you around underground, so until endgame you can usually pretty reliably rest up when needed, as well as finding player-built safehouses dotted around the map. second, it's now fun to find a safe place, and then rest to fastforward to sunrise which will also help your stamina.

i think the change to stamina drain isn't difficulty for the sake of difficulty, it's a way to encourage the player to use the resources available to them more often - you now need your canteen more often, etc. remember how red dead 2 had all these mechanics like cleaning your gun that never mattered because your gun always worked just fine if you ignored it? i love red dead 2 but that kind of "this mechanic doesnt really matter mechanically" thing was all over the game, like they hadn't committed to giving the player a real reason to use them. again, i am absolutely not a "hard mode only" sicko, and i think death stranding 2 has struck a very good balance between "stamina doesnt matter" and "you can be outside for 2 minutes before you have to rest."

i love this game's plot much more than the original, though the first game is absolutely necessary if you're gonna understand or feel most of the events/concepts in this one. also, there are some things the original did that death stranding 2 kinda ditches. two notes:

1. death stranding 1 had this air of severely weird and unsettling mystery to it, and that's mostly gone in ds2. this isn't because i know about death stranding now, i played the game 8 times and felt it every time - the bit where sam and fragile are in the cave and the handprints are moving around still feels a lot more "what in the world is happening" than anything in ds2. i don't think this is a fault, it's just different - ds2 is much more open about solidifying and explaining itself in a way that isn't just buried away in the codex. for example, BTs - in ds1 any ghost is just called a BT, though there appeared to be 3 different types that worked together. in 2, BTs are more explicitly given specific names - gazers will chase you, hunters will come out of the ground to drag you, catchers are the big creepoids who eat you. it makes sense, in-world, why some of that mystery would be stripped away as people start to understand how the death stranding works.

2. my least favorite part of ds1 was amelie. i think her performance wasn't great, but that's fine - the thing that bothers me is the extended trope i've seen in plenty of japanese works (including and especially mgs3) where the main character is a guy who loves a woman who is older than him, and it's *extremely and uncomfortably unclear* whether that love is a motherly love or a romantic love. they're just vague enough. naked snake and the boss had a very similar relationship in snake eater, and it is just a weird and gross feeling. luckily, she's not a main character in the sequel at all. her role is still important to the story, of course, but she's now treated more as an Entity rather than much of a direct actor in the story. she shows up for two seconds at the end and it feels like a Big Deal, like how i didn't like the first doctor strange movie but when he showed up in infinity war i inexplicably thought "oh whoa it's doctor strange!!!"

i love all the characters in ds2, both returning and new. ds1's story was something i enjoyed, but mostly as a lens on the fun exploration i was doing. in ds2, i just ate up every weird cutscene and character interaction. dollman is set up as the most hand-holdy kojima tutorial-style character ever made, but he's there for an extremely good reason and i ended up always loving hearing what he had to say, with the exception of when he reminds me to take a shower for the thousandth time.

there were stories last year about how kojima changed the order of some plot developments in ds2 last minute. i have my own theories about what may have been changed, but the story definitely still works as we got it. he didn't trash the game, in fact all he did was make certain things a little more subtly developed, which is weird for kojima, he's not exactly known for subtlety. it's a great story, both hilarious and genuinely emotional, that stuck with me at the end more than the first game's did.

Low Roar isn't the main star here, it's a new artist called Woodkid who i think does an incredible job. Low Roar is still there though, and the first new song of theirs you hear in this is a certified banger, that bass line is incredible.

finally, here's a cryptic, non-spoiler list of missable things you shouldn't miss:
1. when you're heading back home in mexico at the beginning, don't avoid the enemies that appear - just blast right through them on your tricycle straight towards home. i missed this on my first playthrough
2. inventor, 4 stars
3. hotspring missions. always use the touchpad (or w/e key on keyboard) over and over to make sam sing, please god always do it
4. when dollman wants to listen to a song, you should oblige and then see what he has to say about it

death stranding 2 and alan wake 2 are doing the lord's work in including astonishingly weird musical numbers in their game

the game is really great!!!! just know that if you see anybody complaining about "censorship," in this case it's because they're mad they can't look up the characters' skirts. that's literally it, theyre trying to make looking up girls' skirts a culture war issue and it's really embarrassing

a big honkin' "go to hell" to all you creeps who infect every steam discussion for every game that has women or people of color in it, either complaining that they have to play as a woman and/or complaining that they can't get skimpier outfits for the women. you are a cancer, you make the world worse, and you make it harder to enjoy/recommend my favorite medium. everybody sees past your whiny "immersion"/"censorship" nonsense to the creepy snowflake slimeball underneath, even if you don't. go outside and leave us alone.

i streamed shenmue 1 for my friends and had enough time between game events that i was able to put together an elaborate, extravagantly ugly overlay that said "~*~waiting for shemue~*~" i could put up while the objective was "wait literal real life hours until you can do the next thing," which happens several times

shenmue is so charming and enraging, i didn't have the heart to stick it out through the forklift days, but most of the best content is done by that point so i don't feel bad about it. some day i will wait for shemue 2, which is the one i watched my brother play on xbox back in the day