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Post by Xeogred on Sept 13, 2020 17:12:45 GMT -5
I knocked out the two Control DLC's this weekend. I'm pretty stoked for whatever Remedy does next! It's just a real shame that Remedy doesn't have the rights to Max Payne still, but since it's literally Sam Lake's face and the VO was in Control for one character, I wonder if they could just bring him back as like "Pain" or something haha. Anyways yeah, it's no spoiler since the DLC spells it out, but the Control AWE DLC does crossover Alan Wake with Control, so I can't wait to see how this Remedy-verse continues on now.
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Post by anayo on Sept 15, 2020 17:08:03 GMT -5
1) Quake 2a) Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness (human campaign) 3) Blood 4a) Mechwarrior 2 Pentium Edition: Jade Falcon Campaign 4b) Mechwarrior 2 Pentium Edition: Wolf Clan Campain 5) Shadow Warrior 6) Mechwarrior 2: Ghost Bear's Legacy 7) Doom 2 8) Lego Island 2b) Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness (orc campaign) 9) Road Rash 10) Toy Story Animated Storybook 11) Half Life: Opposing Force 12) Mechwarrior 2: Mercenaries 13) Quake II 14) A.D.A.M. The Inside Story 15) Commander Keen Episode One: Marooned on Mars 16) Commander Keen Episode Two: The Earth Explodes! 17) Ion Fury 18) Star Wars Episode One: Racer 19) Lego Rock Raiders 20) Gunman Chronicles 21) The Oregon Trail II 22) DuskDusk (2018) is one of those games promising to bring back an old nostalgic title under a different, copyright-compliant name (i.e. Freedom Planet instead of Sonic or Bloodstained instead of Castlevania.) Dusk mainly sets out to recreate Quake (1996). When I showed Dusk to my brother he said, “This doesn’t look like my kind of game.” But when I showed Dusk to chibby he said, “Oh this looks great. It reminds me of Unreal Tournament.” In Dusk, each stage has 3 colored keys and 3 colored doors. Increasingly powerful enemies appear every stage or so. Pistols, shotguns, machine guns, and rocket launchers are distributed in that order. The campaign consists of arranging these elements into more and more challenging configurations. One could say Dusk's adherence to this formula leaves it bereft of originality. One could also say these elements are like instruments in a band which can only be altered so far before it's not the same genre anymore. If you take the more charitable of those two interpretations, as I did, Dusk earns its place in the pantheon of classic PC FPS titles unto which it strives to pay homage. Dusk knows what it's setting out to do and it does that very well. I caught myself doing math to figure out how many rounds it would take to dispatch enemies ("That big guy with the flamethrower takes one rifle round. Those red-hooded cultists take two rockets. The invisible deer-headed guy takes four double-barreled shotgun blasts.") Dusk is 5% story, 15% exploration and puzzles, and 80% action. I wouldn't change that formula one bit. I have a deep love of MS-DOS games imprinted on me from my formative childhood experiences. Dusk does all it can to embody the technology from that time, but it also succeeds in the more ineffable quality of capturing what people thought was cool in those days. As soon as I stepped into Dusk’s eerie, lantern-lit farmhouses overrun with cultists, I felt a subversive thrill reminiscent of Blood (1997), as though I was playing something I shouldn’t be. The occult undertones only grow more twisted and nightmarish. One stage featuring a building-sized meat grinder digesting human victims epitomizes this. No matter how much modern gaming continues to misalign itself with my tastes, I’m pleased that middleware and development tools are accessible enough to bring about niche software like this. It wouldn't work as a mainstream hit today, but Dusk feels like it was designed specifically to appeal to me.
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Post by Xeogred on Sept 15, 2020 17:48:34 GMT -5
Nice one anayo. I had a blast with Dusk. I still have a hard time deciding on which I like more between that one and Ion Fury. I'm hopeful there's more quality 90's throwback FPS's I need to play that rank up to these two.
My little review for it on Steam.
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Post by anayo on Sept 15, 2020 17:59:54 GMT -5
Nice one anayo . I had a blast with Dusk. I still have a hard time deciding on which I like more between that one and Ion Fury. I'm hopeful there's more quality 90's throwback FPS's I need to play that rank up to these two.
Mechanically I think Dusk was a more solid experience, but I respect for Ion Fury more for its use of a period-accurate game engine. I didn't find Dusk to be as flagrant as Bloodstained Curse of the Moon's failure to convince me I was playing an NES game. But there were still jarring reminders that I was playing a unity engine title pretending to be MS-DOS software. I wanted to mention something about the soundtrack. It's so good. I really hope there's an episode 4, too. I'd buy it right away.
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Post by Xeogred on Sept 15, 2020 18:20:14 GMT -5
Nice one anayo . I had a blast with Dusk. I still have a hard time deciding on which I like more between that one and Ion Fury. I'm hopeful there's more quality 90's throwback FPS's I need to play that rank up to these two.
Mechanically I think Dusk was a more solid experience, but I respect for Ion Fury more for its use of a period-accurate game engine. I didn't find Dusk to be as flagrant as Bloodstained Curse of the Moon's failure to convince me I was playing an NES game. But there were still jarring reminders that I was playing a unity engine title pretending to be MS-DOS software. Yeah that's a very good way to put it. So perhaps WRATH: Aeon of Ruin will be the perfect marriage of Ion Fury and DUSK... WRATH being a modified Quake 1 engine game. I'm so stoked for that one, but I'm not playing it until the "early access" is done.
I'd love to see more Build engine games too. There's a lot of charm to that colorful engine when it's in the hands of a talented crew and Ion Fury really showed how much you can still flex with it. I wouldn't mind if we got official sequels to Duke or Blood this way haha.
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Post by anayo on Sept 15, 2020 19:16:10 GMT -5
Mechanically I think Dusk was a more solid experience, but I respect for Ion Fury more for its use of a period-accurate game engine. I didn't find Dusk to be as flagrant as Bloodstained Curse of the Moon's failure to convince me I was playing an NES game. But there were still jarring reminders that I was playing a unity engine title pretending to be MS-DOS software. Yeah that's a very good way to put it. So perhaps WRATH: Aeon of Ruin will be the perfect marriage of Ion Fury and DUSK... WRATH being a modified Quake 1 engine game. I'm so stoked for that one, but I'm not playing it until the "early access" is done.
I'd love to see more Build engine games too. There's a lot of charm to that colorful engine when it's in the hands of a talented crew and Ion Fury really showed how much you can still flex with it. I wouldn't mind if we got official sequels to Duke or Blood this way haha.
Yessss. Wrath Aeon of Ruin has been on my list since it was announced. But I refuse to pay for games that aren't finished yet. If I'm remembering correctly I held off from buying Dusk at first for that reason. I think initially it only had one episode ready or something.
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Post by Ex on Sept 15, 2020 21:36:31 GMT -5
I refuse to pay for games that aren't finished yet. Smart man. "In dev" = red flag.
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Post by Deleted on Sept 16, 2020 5:18:44 GMT -5
I'm also looking forward to Wraith as soon as it exits Early Access. Pretty interested in Hell Hunt, CROSSBOW: Bloodnight and Gloomwood as well. Maybe I'll play Hellbound and Hedon sometimes, too. Anayo, I think you might appreciate Thief as Dusk pays homage to it, especially in Episode 3. Also, you might want to give Marathon a shot for a different kind of shooter (can get the Windows port for free here). The story and atmosphere are pretty good. Recently The Citadel came out, a pretty blatant Marathon clone... with anime girls in it.
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Post by Xeogred on Sept 16, 2020 13:31:50 GMT -5
Whoa, Gloomwood and The Citadel look the coolest to me between all those.
I've heard Hellbound is pretty short. I can see how that one and Hedon look a bit more low priority.
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Post by Sarge on Oct 4, 2020 19:41:12 GMT -5
Just finished up Gravity Rush. Fun game that takes a lot of time to get used to. Basically, you don't so much as fly as you fall the direction you point when engaging your powers. Interesting mechanic, but there are some real qualms about how they've implemented some of the controls here. Gravity sliding has you put both thumbs on the screen and tilt to control (not very accurate), and evading also requires swiping the screen. Not at all optimal. Outside of that, it's mostly fine, although you'll almost never use your regular melee attacks once you get your Gravity Kick powered up, so you're just floating in air and pounding enemies with you as a human missile.
Lush graphics for a Vita game, although the color palette can be strangely muted at times. It looks good, though. Not as good as the remaster, obviously, but good. When you're not trying to do the occasional optional challenges, the game is fun. The optional stuff consists of stuff like races through checkpoints or timed enemy battles. Basic stuff, and only useful to get more gems, which you use to power up. Gems are also scattered through the environments.
The story takes the form of the usual "what the heck is going on here" weirdness that you often see in games like this, with very little resolution or clarity to be found in the end. There's a little bit of "sleeping god" bits, but I won't get much into it. Let's just say the atmosphere was good, but the story feels incomplete. They clearly were planning a sequel, which of course did happen. No idea if we'll ever get a Gravity Rush 3, though. Just so many loose threads at the end... makes things a little frustrating.
If I had to toss a rating to it, it's probably a 7.5/10. I want to rate it higher, but various control niggles and plot elements that don't resolve are enough for me to keep it from the truly great. Also, the game has no in-game timer, so I have absolutely no idea how much time I actually spent on it. HLTB has Main Story as 10 hours, Extra as 13.5. The latter sounds pretty close, so I'll roll with that.
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