Recent Activity


Whom commented on green's review of Super Mario Bros.
This game always messes me up because of the fucked way your jump seems to stall out in the middle of it

18 days ago


18 days ago


19 days ago


Whom backloggd Castlevania

20 days ago


Whom is now playing Pentiment

20 days ago


Whom completed Balatro
Perfectly presented and finely tuned to be intensely satisfying with meaningful and sometimes mind-straining choices to be made. If I have any complaint, it's only that the given jokers unlocked near the beginning don't allow quite as interesting of game breaks as I'd prefer. I'm not the kind of person to beat this with every different deck in a million different ways and likely won't put in that many hours unless greater and more dynamic challenges come along so if the later unlocks do this more I'll have no way of knowing, but in this kind of game I am most interested in banging different mechanics together and seeing how the game interprets the combinations and attempts to still look like a functioning video game while you break it in every way you can possibly think of. There are of course ways to break the game and there have been people putting up absurd point totals since the beta, but I rarely get that "holy shit, THAT works??" feeling I love to get in a game like Isaac. That's not really a failing of Balatro, though, it's probably mostly a limitation of a straightforward number crunching game where it's really hard to let things break in a way that's more interesting than a number going higher than you'd expect.

Seeing the minority of negative reviews here saying it's no better than actual gambling games or exploitative mobile apps has been really eye-opening for me. I thought we always agreed the tactics those use were terrible for ruining lives and emptying bank accounts, but it turns out for a significant portion of people (even those whose opinions I'm otherwise interested in), it was a simple aesthetic distaste for animations, sound effects, and gameplay loops intended to light up your brain at a base level rather than reaching for more Intellectual pleasures. It's a repeat of Vampire Survivors: no matter how safe of an environment the design principles are used within, no matter the richness of everything else that makes up the experience (and make no mistake, this is much deeper than VS ever was), they see some sort of threat or great evil in the simple pleasures of a digital toy that contains the ruffling sounds of card pack foil or a flashing light or two.

If you ask me, this attitude is elitist nonsense masquerading as concern for the vulnerable.

21 days ago


Whom retired Madden NFL 24
My previous experiences with madden were primarily on the PS2 and the last I owned was 09 on the PSP, so now I that I have an up to date non-Nintendo console for the first time in a good while, I thought I'd see what had changed with Madden. As you can probably guess, the answer is "not all that much." Well, not all that much except it now runs like dogshit. The damn main menu brings the PS5 to its knees and both performance and quality mode hitch like hell despite not even being all that impressive-looking compared to what this machine is capable of. It's clear that the yearly cycle of Madden has taken its toll, and I imagine something this rushed and barely functional is all the developers could manage while ensuring the next one releases on time.

It's sad, just about the only novel addition I've found is a mode reworking the Create-A-Team of old into a loot box-driven affair. I would've tried this out more to assess if it has any value at all but this is where the menus struggle and inappropriately overlap each other the most, a few jpegs with players' faces on them clearly being too much for the Playstation 5. I spent most of my time playing a custom career and planned to log this as completed once I got a ring in that, but I just lost interest after my goofy creation John Darksouls' third season. Didn't character creation back in the day involve a bunch of fun flavor like rolling your parents' professions and such? I miss that. Anyway, this mode is just too repetitive and requires far too much menuing and mindless practice between each game to be worth it. Still, this is where I had the most fun and when you're enthusiastic enough about football it's still a good time. That's the thing: football is fun by default. You'd have to really fuck up to ruin that, and modern Madden isn't yet that much of a disaster.

There are still various projects out there updating Madden 08 for current rosters and such. I'm not going to say that outclasses '24 in every respect, the passing mechanics are a fair bit richer now and for the novelty of being up to date this will probably be what I reach for to play head to head locally, but for the most part 08'll probably serve you about as well and at least the menus will fucking work.

-

Side note: This is an example of one of the many reasons intellectual property is bullshit which steals from what should rightfully belong to us all. Football games would be so much better if we weren't stuck with a single company holding the license for the league which is practically synonymous with the sport itself.

21 days ago


Whom completed Alan Wake: The Writer
A lot more imaginative with the environment breaking down and word-based interactions than the previous bonus episode, but the combat continues to wear thin and I'm still left wishing this embraced just being a 3D adventure. That wheel portion was brutal, too. It's been a while since I've had a game trigger my motion sickness so badly.

I really appreciate how much they're playing with how little we actually know about Alan, Barry, and Alice's relationships before the events of this story, making it difficult to take the horrible things we see in the dark place as entirely deceptive or just manifestations of self-hatred. It drags the story back into encouraging interpretation and active engagement instead of the rather straightforward final sections of the base game which wrapped things up a little too nicely for my liking.

22 days ago


Whom completed Alan Wake: The Signal
I appreciate the increasingly unhinged brain constantly screaming aesthetic here but good god am I tired of just shooting at everything until it falls down. Light bringing words sitting around the environment into the false-reality of the dark place is sick as hell but I feel like it could've been an opportunity for puzzling that never really came.

I'm still gripped by the story and this did nothing to reverse that, but this episode was more an opportunity to let the emotions from the base game swirl around for a while rather than add that much.

25 days ago


Whom played Nidhogg
I and the person I love most are nearly perfectly matched in this and it's brought some of the most raw, unfiltered joy I've experienced playing a video game. There's so much room for natural discovery and the actions are so dead-simple that you cut right through to the multilayered rock paper scissors and personal metagaming that make traditional fighting games so satisfying in their best moments. The levels pulsate and warp and sway in the most hypnotic ways and you're locked together running back and forth and back and forth in a dance that seems to never end and you are wholly consumed by the game and the person you're sharing it with and you approach that kind of momentary inner quiet you thought you'd never have again even as you're involuntarily shouting from impaling yourself again by diving in when your opponent was just standing still.

I'm 100% sure if I go out and look for it I'll find strategies, tech, and optimization which take away from that feeling of discovery and replace it with a tighter grasp on the mechanics bringing you and the opponent closer in a different way, but I'm not gonna let the optimization virus get this one unless I work my way there myself. There's something to be said for the maximum-information environment that is the default for any game nowadays, but there's also something beautiful about the high speed improv of a low information closed system of two players who don't have any idea how other people play it.

Ask yourself: in the past 15 or so years, how many times have you had the opportunity to feel like a multiplayer game is something between you and the people close to you, not really knowing or caring how others play it or what the "right" way to do it is?

25 days ago


Whom played Stick Fight: The Game
A bit of good fun but we were playing this with only the two of us and an inactive player (from my keyboard being connected I guess?) and in that setting its limiting simplicity becomes obvious pretty quickly. Still, this is the kind of goofy chaos local multiplayer is all about and I'll be keeping it in my back pocket for when I'm looking for something to do with a larger group.

25 days ago


Whom is now playing Nidhogg

27 days ago


Whom backloggd Ghost Bike

27 days ago


27 days ago


29 days ago


Filter Activities