NightDuck
213 reviews liked by NightDuck
This takes me back to the good ol' days of forumfree and forumcommunity.
Dragon's Dogma II
2024
I really like this game. I think. I'm pretty sure. But whenever I come back and think about it I don't know how much I actually like it. But I do like it.
Desert Bus
2011
Every year since 2013, a French charitable event called "Desert Bus de l'espoir" (Desert Bus of hope) is held in order to receive donations for the Petit Prince association that finances dreams of children suffering from terminal illness. In 2022, over 70 609€ were collected.
While it would be easy to make fun of the "haha bus bad" game without taking into consideration the story behind its existence, I just really wanted to point out how something originally made as a piece of satire and novelty against the assumption that video games were too violent turned into such a symbol of support and empathy.
While it would be easy to make fun of the "haha bus bad" game without taking into consideration the story behind its existence, I just really wanted to point out how something originally made as a piece of satire and novelty against the assumption that video games were too violent turned into such a symbol of support and empathy.
In fairness, the thoughtfulness with regards to possible win/lose conditions does exhibit more foresight than most modern game devs seem to be able to muster.
a bad story, badly told, experienced through the re-animated corpse of a video game that no longer exists. 2.0 doesn't have the dramatic and mythological death of 1.0, but as you run through silent zones all alone talking to absolutely no one, playing with skill trees balanced for an endgame four expansions away, you realise it is equally dead and gone.
mmos are social moments as much as they are video games, and the moment of time that was a realm reborn has long gone. to play it now is to simultaneously understand how a game that was heralded as the greatest redemption story in history is now seen as an albatross around ff14's neck. the half measures put in place to 'solve' this only highlight the problem more than solve it, as now it's quicker to get through, but the rhythm of the zones is absolutely killed as side quests are less than useless, the sense of space is obliterated, and the ratio of time spent watching awful cutscenes as opposed to playing the video game slides drastically in the wrong direction.
that said, the video game? is good! the world is beautiful and delightful to explore, the simplified rotations are still enjoyable and the faster levelling means you aren't taking too long between getting new skills. the lack of cross-class skills is a huge shame however and does feel like a piece of the game's soul is ripped out, the core identity of a job system streamlined away in the (probably justified) cause of endgame social convenience. but there is a joy to exploring eorzea and running dungeons that all the streamlining in the world can't kill.
the same cannot be said for the story, which is a car crash of multiple decisions made due to the reality of this game's nightmare development, that nonetheless conspire to ruin my life. cutscenes are stock animations and textboxes, so everything takes ten times too long and i can't button through fast enough. but the dialog itself has been localised by satan, so you have to slow down to read the most overwrought purple prose without tripping over it. the story is meant to be a tragic tale of struggle after a world ending calamity, but they're reusing all the assets from the last game so bahamut's casualty list is reduced to one old guy and every unnamed town NPC's entire family. it simultaneously wants to be a serious political study of navigating deep rooted conflict between nations and people, but it's also a cartoon for five year olds where the solution to every problem is "believing in hope" and you're the most special boy ever who has solved every problem look the president is here to throw you a party.
it does not work lmao. there are a few bright spots. i enjoyed a few job quests, specifically marauder and bard. rogue had a great little ending where it turned into lupin the third. the villains in gaius' tokusatsu squadron, inexplicably, all get more character work than any of the heroes despite having about two scenes each. this leads to hilarious situations where the most sympathetic characters in the game pour their heart out and make their tragic case while your guy doesn't react and silently murders them in the name of peace, because he is an mmo protagonist.
but aside from that i truly was dreading every cutscene. simply i am here to ride around on cloud's motorbike and do some damn tab targeting. and on that front it still delivers. there's even a few standout dungeons like aurum vale that has actual mechanics in the environment or the final bombastic praetorium assault. genuinely delightful moments, windows into oh right i fucking love final fantasy when the music is going off and there's an airship and also organization xiii is there for some reason.
so it is what it is. three stars. it's a video game. however mad and/or bored i got i was compelled to keep playing, because it is fun to hit a boss with DOTs. it is fun to pull like twenty guys into AOE range and feel immortal. please lower the teleport costs by the time i get to 7.0
mmos are social moments as much as they are video games, and the moment of time that was a realm reborn has long gone. to play it now is to simultaneously understand how a game that was heralded as the greatest redemption story in history is now seen as an albatross around ff14's neck. the half measures put in place to 'solve' this only highlight the problem more than solve it, as now it's quicker to get through, but the rhythm of the zones is absolutely killed as side quests are less than useless, the sense of space is obliterated, and the ratio of time spent watching awful cutscenes as opposed to playing the video game slides drastically in the wrong direction.
that said, the video game? is good! the world is beautiful and delightful to explore, the simplified rotations are still enjoyable and the faster levelling means you aren't taking too long between getting new skills. the lack of cross-class skills is a huge shame however and does feel like a piece of the game's soul is ripped out, the core identity of a job system streamlined away in the (probably justified) cause of endgame social convenience. but there is a joy to exploring eorzea and running dungeons that all the streamlining in the world can't kill.
the same cannot be said for the story, which is a car crash of multiple decisions made due to the reality of this game's nightmare development, that nonetheless conspire to ruin my life. cutscenes are stock animations and textboxes, so everything takes ten times too long and i can't button through fast enough. but the dialog itself has been localised by satan, so you have to slow down to read the most overwrought purple prose without tripping over it. the story is meant to be a tragic tale of struggle after a world ending calamity, but they're reusing all the assets from the last game so bahamut's casualty list is reduced to one old guy and every unnamed town NPC's entire family. it simultaneously wants to be a serious political study of navigating deep rooted conflict between nations and people, but it's also a cartoon for five year olds where the solution to every problem is "believing in hope" and you're the most special boy ever who has solved every problem look the president is here to throw you a party.
it does not work lmao. there are a few bright spots. i enjoyed a few job quests, specifically marauder and bard. rogue had a great little ending where it turned into lupin the third. the villains in gaius' tokusatsu squadron, inexplicably, all get more character work than any of the heroes despite having about two scenes each. this leads to hilarious situations where the most sympathetic characters in the game pour their heart out and make their tragic case while your guy doesn't react and silently murders them in the name of peace, because he is an mmo protagonist.
but aside from that i truly was dreading every cutscene. simply i am here to ride around on cloud's motorbike and do some damn tab targeting. and on that front it still delivers. there's even a few standout dungeons like aurum vale that has actual mechanics in the environment or the final bombastic praetorium assault. genuinely delightful moments, windows into oh right i fucking love final fantasy when the music is going off and there's an airship and also organization xiii is there for some reason.
so it is what it is. three stars. it's a video game. however mad and/or bored i got i was compelled to keep playing, because it is fun to hit a boss with DOTs. it is fun to pull like twenty guys into AOE range and feel immortal. please lower the teleport costs by the time i get to 7.0
NieR Re[in]carnation
2021
![NieR Re[in]carnation](https://images.igdb.com/igdb/image/upload/t_cover_big/co7bm4.jpg)
This review contains spoilers
first of all it's not a video game. removing the gacha elements only makes this more clear. the only mechanic is Number Big? if number big, you win. if number not big, pay up. in its final pre-cancellation form they let you skip that and in so doing only reveal there was never anything there in the first place, it was alwasy only a series of whale checks in front of that sweet sweet yoko taro lore you crave. the craven cynicism of it all is existentially destructive for the work, as taro's already tiring eccentricities of hiding crucial details in the least accessible of places now become vectors to leverage for the direct exploitation of his audience into a gambling black hole. better hit the pulls so you can upgrade enough bullshit to see the dark memory that reveals the connection to drakengard 3 that makes everything click into place!! don't want to be left behind!!
but that is known. the game is a gacha and more than that it is a bad one even by the exploitative standards of a blighted genre that shouldn't exist, and that's why it's shutting down. nier reincarnation will forever live on as a series of youtube videos where fans can experience the story fairly close to how it was originally intended, and that's more than you can say for japanese exclusive yorha stageplay number squintillion. so how is that?
bad!! very bad!!! the game takes one of the weakest elements of the nier games, the sidequest and weapon stories all having the exact same tragedy monotonously drilled into your skull over and over and make it the entire game. no weiss and kaine bantering to prop all that up with a jrpg party of the greatest oomfs ever pressed to a PS3 disc, no experimental presentation of combat and level design, just storybook tragedies presented at such arch remove you don't even learn the character's names until you check the menu.
it is ludicrous. it is hilarious. there's one where a kid joins the army to get revenge on the enemy commander who killed his parents, only to as he kills him discover with zero forshdaowing that the commander is his real father and his parents kidnapped him as a child. there's one where a perfect angel little girl's father is beaten to death by his own friends so she runs home crying to her mother, who is in the middle of cheating on him, and is like sweet that owns and leaves lmao. they do the who do you think gave you this heart copypasta!!! and you'd think with such ridiculous material that it would be played with a coens-esque A Serious Man type wry touch, but it isn't at all, it's thuddingly earnest throughout as every tragic story plays out to overwrought voice acting and a haunting sad piano.
it is impossible to take seriously, and by the time the twelfth playable character has experienced a tragic loss and succumbed to the anime nihlism of I'll Kill Them All, another more fundemental question arises: what does all this lore actually give you, as a function of storytelling? the yokoverse is an intricate and near impossible thing, spanning multiple decades and every kind of storytelling medium imaginable, and reincarnation references damn near every single page of it, grasping onto the whole thing and framing it as a sprawling multiverse of human conflict across infinite pasts and infinite futures, with decades of mysteries to unravel and connections to make and characters to ponder and: why? for the exact same No Matter How Bad It Gets, You Can't Give Up On Hope ending that every anime RPG has? that automata already did? the plot is vast and intricate but the themes are narrow and puddle deep.
the more nier blows itself out to greater and greater scales the smaller it feels. in earthbound you fight the same ultimate nihlism of a the universe and then you walk back home again. and you say goodbye to your friends. and you call your dad. and it makes me cry like a fucking baby every time. the original nier, for all its faults, had that specificity. that sense of a journey with characters you loved that overcame the generic nature of its larger plot. here, you heal all the tragedies and fix all the timelines and everyone continues to live inside the infinite quantum simulations that will never end as you strive to find a way past the cyclical apocalypses past and future that repeat for all eternity, and i feel absolutely nothing. a world of endless content and no humanity. how tragic. how so very like nier.
but that is known. the game is a gacha and more than that it is a bad one even by the exploitative standards of a blighted genre that shouldn't exist, and that's why it's shutting down. nier reincarnation will forever live on as a series of youtube videos where fans can experience the story fairly close to how it was originally intended, and that's more than you can say for japanese exclusive yorha stageplay number squintillion. so how is that?
bad!! very bad!!! the game takes one of the weakest elements of the nier games, the sidequest and weapon stories all having the exact same tragedy monotonously drilled into your skull over and over and make it the entire game. no weiss and kaine bantering to prop all that up with a jrpg party of the greatest oomfs ever pressed to a PS3 disc, no experimental presentation of combat and level design, just storybook tragedies presented at such arch remove you don't even learn the character's names until you check the menu.
it is ludicrous. it is hilarious. there's one where a kid joins the army to get revenge on the enemy commander who killed his parents, only to as he kills him discover with zero forshdaowing that the commander is his real father and his parents kidnapped him as a child. there's one where a perfect angel little girl's father is beaten to death by his own friends so she runs home crying to her mother, who is in the middle of cheating on him, and is like sweet that owns and leaves lmao. they do the who do you think gave you this heart copypasta!!! and you'd think with such ridiculous material that it would be played with a coens-esque A Serious Man type wry touch, but it isn't at all, it's thuddingly earnest throughout as every tragic story plays out to overwrought voice acting and a haunting sad piano.
it is impossible to take seriously, and by the time the twelfth playable character has experienced a tragic loss and succumbed to the anime nihlism of I'll Kill Them All, another more fundemental question arises: what does all this lore actually give you, as a function of storytelling? the yokoverse is an intricate and near impossible thing, spanning multiple decades and every kind of storytelling medium imaginable, and reincarnation references damn near every single page of it, grasping onto the whole thing and framing it as a sprawling multiverse of human conflict across infinite pasts and infinite futures, with decades of mysteries to unravel and connections to make and characters to ponder and: why? for the exact same No Matter How Bad It Gets, You Can't Give Up On Hope ending that every anime RPG has? that automata already did? the plot is vast and intricate but the themes are narrow and puddle deep.
the more nier blows itself out to greater and greater scales the smaller it feels. in earthbound you fight the same ultimate nihlism of a the universe and then you walk back home again. and you say goodbye to your friends. and you call your dad. and it makes me cry like a fucking baby every time. the original nier, for all its faults, had that specificity. that sense of a journey with characters you loved that overcame the generic nature of its larger plot. here, you heal all the tragedies and fix all the timelines and everyone continues to live inside the infinite quantum simulations that will never end as you strive to find a way past the cyclical apocalypses past and future that repeat for all eternity, and i feel absolutely nothing. a world of endless content and no humanity. how tragic. how so very like nier.
Normally if I enjoy a game I'd either try to have fun with my writing and do something corny like roleplaying as a character or go insanely heavy on the showmanship, but for the sake of this I'm actually going to be really vanilla and bore everyone to death.
Before I heel out, I'd like to let it be known that I was rooting for this game. When it was originally revealed in one of the Directs, I clapped, I hooted, and I hollered, for she deserves the universe and everything in it. She's an icon, she's a legend, and she is the moment. I heard it get compared to Wario World, which made me bounce off walls like Spring Wario from the classic Game Boy games. I could imagine it now, Peach womanhandling every bad guy in sight and going on an exciting journey through every genre of artistic theater known by Mushroomy Kingdom history. Unfortunately, comparing Good-Feel to even one of Treasure's lesser developments is essentially like putting silly putty next to an unpolished diamond.
"Engagement" and "difficulty" are two separate things, and it really needs to be stressed that the latter means little in the grand stage of what makes a game do what a game does, which is engage the player and take their mind off life, with the "fun yeah woo" energy replacing all their other thought processes. Spyro the Dragon and Ninja Gaiden are on opposite ends of the spectrum and still manage to be a few of my favorites to ever do it. Just a few days ago, I played Bugs Bunny Lost in Time on stream in a Discord call with one of my friends as she did some programming, and that is a game "made for children" with very little punishment dealt out for mistakes. For how jank and lower budget it was, it was fun with decent puzzles, cool ship combat, car chase segments, and even pretty good boss fights! It's something I enjoyed when I was eight, and still do now as an adult.
Peach Showtime for all of it's poor performing extravagance doesn't even use a lot of the joycon's controls, and many segments are very linear and on-rails with one of the Detective Peach puzzles quite literally having the solution put up on the wall for you. Using a simple control scheme is never a bad thing in itself, I enjoy an Atari game now and then, but the fine art of utilizing that simple control scheme demands creativity that extends beyond auto-scrolling sections that make 100%'ing the game annoying. It would also ask for enemies to master the very tricky art of "moving the fuck around a little" to justify having the world's most lenient parry window. It's frustrating, because for every half-decent powergaming moment that involves throwing hitboxes around enemies that are less threatening than beginner mode Musou soldiers it's spliced between very uninteresting unskippable dialogue, uneventful non-combat plays, auto-scrolling/auto-running sections, and "puzzle" segments that are more trivial than microwave cooking. It makes me drowsy! I've played stuff like Toy Story Activity Center off the Collection Chamber and Number Munchers last year, and that stuff was pretty fun despite the target audience! Hell, I still come back to Wacky Worlds Creativity Studio on Sega Genesis just to screw around with the music maker! It stimulates my imagination, unlike Peach Showtime!
Give kids some respect, or even better give Peach some respect. A little bit of both I feel would go a long way.
....Also, I know I'm preaching to the choir on this subject, but why does the game run so goddamn bad? The loading screen and results screen run worse than a bunch of Atari Jaguar games I've played, was it a bad style choice? It would check out I guess, I may as well be playing a movie game.
A dull direct-to-VHS Disney movie game.
Before I heel out, I'd like to let it be known that I was rooting for this game. When it was originally revealed in one of the Directs, I clapped, I hooted, and I hollered, for she deserves the universe and everything in it. She's an icon, she's a legend, and she is the moment. I heard it get compared to Wario World, which made me bounce off walls like Spring Wario from the classic Game Boy games. I could imagine it now, Peach womanhandling every bad guy in sight and going on an exciting journey through every genre of artistic theater known by Mushroomy Kingdom history. Unfortunately, comparing Good-Feel to even one of Treasure's lesser developments is essentially like putting silly putty next to an unpolished diamond.
"Engagement" and "difficulty" are two separate things, and it really needs to be stressed that the latter means little in the grand stage of what makes a game do what a game does, which is engage the player and take their mind off life, with the "fun yeah woo" energy replacing all their other thought processes. Spyro the Dragon and Ninja Gaiden are on opposite ends of the spectrum and still manage to be a few of my favorites to ever do it. Just a few days ago, I played Bugs Bunny Lost in Time on stream in a Discord call with one of my friends as she did some programming, and that is a game "made for children" with very little punishment dealt out for mistakes. For how jank and lower budget it was, it was fun with decent puzzles, cool ship combat, car chase segments, and even pretty good boss fights! It's something I enjoyed when I was eight, and still do now as an adult.
Peach Showtime for all of it's poor performing extravagance doesn't even use a lot of the joycon's controls, and many segments are very linear and on-rails with one of the Detective Peach puzzles quite literally having the solution put up on the wall for you. Using a simple control scheme is never a bad thing in itself, I enjoy an Atari game now and then, but the fine art of utilizing that simple control scheme demands creativity that extends beyond auto-scrolling sections that make 100%'ing the game annoying. It would also ask for enemies to master the very tricky art of "moving the fuck around a little" to justify having the world's most lenient parry window. It's frustrating, because for every half-decent powergaming moment that involves throwing hitboxes around enemies that are less threatening than beginner mode Musou soldiers it's spliced between very uninteresting unskippable dialogue, uneventful non-combat plays, auto-scrolling/auto-running sections, and "puzzle" segments that are more trivial than microwave cooking. It makes me drowsy! I've played stuff like Toy Story Activity Center off the Collection Chamber and Number Munchers last year, and that stuff was pretty fun despite the target audience! Hell, I still come back to Wacky Worlds Creativity Studio on Sega Genesis just to screw around with the music maker! It stimulates my imagination, unlike Peach Showtime!
Give kids some respect, or even better give Peach some respect. A little bit of both I feel would go a long way.
....Also, I know I'm preaching to the choir on this subject, but why does the game run so goddamn bad? The loading screen and results screen run worse than a bunch of Atari Jaguar games I've played, was it a bad style choice? It would check out I guess, I may as well be playing a movie game.
A dull direct-to-VHS Disney movie game.
Yumimi Mix Remix
1995
The cultural context section of the translation readme mentions how two of the bands this game references broke up the exact year the original version released, and that's the sort of "sans killing the queen" energy I gotta respect.
Dislyte
2022
Guys please make a fighting game or something you can't just drop such a cool premise and character designs on a shitty gacha game guys please.
Behold! The thing that singlehandedly ended the golden age of gaming, apparently. Don't look into things like executives that want literally infinite money or bigger studios causing lack of cohesion between overworked Devs or things getting more expensive in general. Some guy paying 2.50 for horse cosmetics in 2006 led to every practise you don't like in gaming ever because that's how trends work
45 lists liked by NightDuck
by GingerV |
6 Games
by chandler |
48 Games
by letshugbro |
8 Games
by TransWitchSammy |
20 Games
by AlexaLily |
11 Games
by FMTownsParty |
39 Games
by belleshade |
13 Games