veebs-hates-video-games

[veebs-hates-video-games]

Before I get too much further behind and forget, I guess I should catch up on a few things I played recently.

Castlevania: Circle of the Moon: After replaying Aria of Sorrow a year or two ago I never got around to touching either of the other GBA Castlevania games until just recently. I forgot how much changed from one to the next even with only a year between them. Gonna be completely honest here: Circle of the Moon feels pretty bad to play to me these days, almost closer in some ways to the older games I never liked much even in the 80s than to the ones that came after it. I didn't last very long this time around.

Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance: I didn't finish this one either, but wow they sure did improve so much stuff from one game to the next. It's still not on the same level as Aria of Sorrow, but it's a lot closer. If I didn't have a bunch of other stuff I'd rather be doing I could see myself having finished this one.

Bubumbu: This one I did actually finish. It's a very short and pretty straightforward hidden object game, but it's entirely hand drawn and pretty charming. Worth paying attention to all the little details around you as you complete the main goals. Not a bad use of less than a dollar and less than an hour.

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Disclaimer: This is a mostly negative post about a game I genuinely really like, mostly just griping about a bunch of minor mechanical and UI/UX annoyances.

My brain demanded Xenoblade, but it doesn't understand that the 20th is in the future, not the past, which means it can't play XCXDE right now, so I went back to my abandoned NG+ playthrough of Xenoblade Chronicles 2 that I stopped halfway through at some point.

As much as I like the story and characters (well, at least after I gave it another chance and finished it after early game Tora made me give up on it for several months), I think it might be my least favorite Xenoblade game to actually play at this point. It's just so severely lacking in polish and QoL features, there's so much jank in it, and it feels pretty bad to go back to after XC3/FR or even having finally played XCDE after having played the Wii version originally.

I get why a lot of people seem to like the combat in XC2 the most because it's very ambitious and has a lot of options for doing a lot of interesting stuff, but it's easily my least favorite by a wide margin at this point. Back when I first played it I thought that they'd been getting consistently better over time with the battle systems, but there's just so much complexity that doesn't add anything meaningful or interesting for me in this one, and there's way too much stuff that relies on party members randomly deciding to not be stupid for a change.

Great, there are eight billion accessories and aux cores and stuff, but 90% of them are completely useless and just make the menus even worse to navigate. Super, you made each character have their own move set for every type of weapon, but multiple weapon types are borederline unplayable, and even of the ones that are good on some characters they're also borderline unplayable on others because their animations are like six times longer for some reason.

And it's just generally worse at giving useful and easily parseable feedback during combat compared to the other games, which doesn't help. For bonus points everything just feels so much mushier than in some of the other games, including movement/jumping and using arts.

The map is also easily the worst out of all of them, and that includes the minimap, plus the menus also kinda suck too. Why does it take so long to open the menu or move between menus with a second or two of delay on becoming responsive again in some cases, why can't I use the shoulder buttons to switch between more things like merc mission regions, why are so many things so many sub-menus deep, why are so many relevant bits of information to what you're doing only visible in a totally different menu that requires backing out of what you're doing, and why are so many of them so much harder to read visually than they need to be (e.g. a lot of blade-related stuff)?

I'm also increasingly convinced the game would've been improved by like 20% just by removing common blades entirely. Unless you really want to run Orb Master or something they're nearly useless clutter. Without them in the way you could easily get rid of or heavily reduce the entire merc mission system (oh well, now Ursula would need to have a blade quest that doesn't suck) too, which is just tedious busywork. And there wouldn't need to be so much time wasted opening core crystals and getting rid of the 98% of stuff you don't want or have a use for.

Also too many of the non-Ursula blade quests kinda suck too. I was doing some that I skipped the first time around, and I might have to skip them this time too because it's really not holding back reminding me why I skipped them. It's such a pain having to go to eight million different places with Agate or Electra or whoever else just to have it tell you that you can't do that part yet and have to come back later. Having no way to find where the UMs are for Zenobia without looking them up online also blows. Why would you make me do that when the tombstones don't even show up on the map?

There's a pretty good chance I never finish this playthrough or ever play the game again (unless there's a remaster some day that fixes a bunch of *gestures vaguely at the rest of this post*), and that's a shame, because I otherwise liked it just as much as the first game overall, and I always wanted to go back through it after all the new info from Torna. It's just so rough to play compared to any of the others though, presumably even X at this point with all the stuff it looks like XCXDE will fix/improve.

I just want to be able to go back to one of my favorite games in what's probably my favorite series without a million little papercuts driving me completely nuts in the process.

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And now for a couple more. You know the drill.

I found zero things to like about The Talos Principle. I know it's generally considered pretty good by the vast majority of people, and I have friends who like it, but I gave up on it pretty quickly.

It got off to a great start by showing raw CSS instead of button prompts in the menus, which it deserves an award for because that's a totally new way to fail catastrophically that I've never seen before. The CPU/GPU settings are also completely baffling.

Once I finally got into the game itself it immediately crawled up its own butt with some pseudo-deep nonsense narrated by "Elohim", which like, sure buddy. I knew it was a bad sign when I was searching for something completely unrelated and pulled up a post on r/Jung recommending it. It continues to be the policy of this blog that anyone who takes Jung seriously is not to be taken seriously.

Maybe the puzzles are ok, or I'd think so in a different context? I actively disliked the way they're presented though, and I could tell it was just never going to click with me.

In better news Proverbs is a thing. A reasonably fun one too. A bunch of reviews I've seen try to describe it as a cross between Minesweeper and Picross, but it's actually its own previously existing puzzle type that's been around for a while, most commonly known as Mosaic.

In my experience it's not a particularly hard type of puzzle, but it's a good choice for what they wanted to use it for. If you're a super hardcore puzzle person looking for a challenge you've come to the wrong place, but also you probably also are aware of Mosaic and have your own opinions on it already. On the other hand if you're just looking for something pretty chill that has a good feeling of progression then this might be it.

I expected it to take a lot longer to finish after seeing the RPS review that said they spent like 36 hours on it, but it took me well under a third of that. Somehow even though I fell asleep at one point with the game still running I managed to finish significantly quicker than any of the submitted times on HLTB, and I wasn't even really trying to go fast.

I briefly almost had a moment of "maybe the Gamers were right and video game reviewers really are bad at games", but then I came to my senses and remembered that in this situation I'm basically Mosaics Georg since it's been in my rotation for multiple years of things I do while listening to podcasts to help me focus.

I guess while I'm here I might as well mention that I've also been having an extremely mixed reaction to the first couple hours of Cyberpunk 2077 so far. The world and characters and story are interesting enough so far, I guess, but I've been having a harder time with everything else.

I think I might actually like the gameplay even less than The Witcher 3, which is saying something because I actively dislike most of the gameplay in TW3. I'm also pretty sure the menus and UI are even worse in some ways than the already kind of iffy ones in TW2, in totally new and different ways. Whoever came up with using an analog stick to move a cursor around is my nemesis, and I'm not convinced it solves any problem that wasn't already addressed by just having better organization and layout of menus before. I know you can use the d-pad instead too, but it doesn't feel like the layout was designed with that in mind as the only input you're using.

And then one of the biggest problems I have is a problem I have with a lot of big games like that these days, which is the graphics. Yeah yeah, it's very technically impressive and looks nice if you're into that sort of thing. I also can't parse what's going on visually a lot of the time because it's so busy. My vision kinda sucks in a mostly uncorrectable way, and all these hyperdetailed environments with realistic materials and lighting in a lot of recent games are kind of the bane of my existence.

If the real world looked anything like that I would die several times a day from not being able to tell I'm walking directly into a wood chipper or whatever. Back to less detailed/more stylized stuff for me, I guess.

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I went into My GF Doesn't Know What I'm Into with basically no expectations. I think it's one of those things that popped up when I was browsing my recommendations starting from the last page and working my way back up, so like 70-80 pages deep, and just kind of went yeah sure I'll click on that.

I won't pretend it really does anything totally new and different, either as a VN or as a horror story, but I still enjoyed it for what it was, and it's surprisingly competent at what it does. It feels a little immature/amateurish at times, especially the end of the first route, but in a way that feels like it was made by someone relatively young and inexperienced who has a lot of potential that they're just starting to get a handle on (keep in mind that my perspective is as An Old Person, and you can be "relatively young" and like half my age and still be an adult).

And speaking of that first ending, it's one of those things where if you're going to do a plot twist in the type of story it starts out as, it's very, very much the most extremely obvious twist to go for, but I appreciate that they just went for it with complete sincerity.

And then after that? It actually got more interesting the longer I stuck with it. Enough so that I got the paid DLC with the additional stories/routes, and that was pretty good too. I liked how far it had gotten away from the tone of the first route and the original premise by the end while still being very directly connected to it. Focusing on different characters and their points of view of the events and their relationships really opened things up a lot in a good way.

It's funny because I saw a bunch of really polarized reviews of it, some saying it's the best thing they've ever read/played and this totally original thing, some saying it's terrible because it's weird or boring or not like [insert other thing they like more].

And like...I don't think either of those is really accurate?

It's not really all that original in the grand scheme of things, but it puts the ideas it does have to good use and is a pretty satisfying version of that type of story. And yeah, sure, it's kind of "weird", but that's kind of the point. You're the one who clicked on the game pretty explicitly described as a cute horror VN. I don't know what you expected.

Anyway, it was a pretty good use of a few bucks and a few hours of my time, and I'm curious to see the progress they've made between this and Hydrangea when I get a chance.

Also it's fun that it lets you choose one of the main characters' pronouns, and no matter what you do it'll still make at least some part of the story queer. Bonus points for the aro character (in the DLC) too.

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Ok I don't think anyone really needs my thoughts on the characters or story of Xenosaga, and I don't have anything new to say that hasn't already been said by other people over the past couple decades, so I'm just going to skip that part. Go ask someone else about it. The short version is that I generally like those parts of it though.

Anyway, I didn't get around to actually attempting to play the games until this year. I never had a PS2, and even though I've been emulating PS2 games for like 15 years I never did with these for some reason. I attempted to play Xenogears before Xenosaga was even out (and never finished it because wow did it feel janky even back then, and trying again last year didn't turn out any better), and I love the entire Xenoblade series, but previously I'd only ever absorbed Xenosaga through friends who were super into it.

I figured maybe I'd try to fix that before XCXDE comes out, but it didn't end up working out that way.

The good news is that even though there were only four years between Xenogears and the first Xenosaga, it feels like there were much more than four years of improvements between them on a technical and QoL level. It holds up much better in Current Year and is much more playable. It actually even still looks pretty good just bumping the resolution up a bit without changing anything else, although the pre-rendered video does stand out as being pretty low res in comparison when you do that.

Things were actually going pretty well for the first few hours, even if stuff like the lack of a proper map is mildly annoying now and then. My experience all started going downhill with Ziggy, which is a shame because that part of the story with Ziggy and MOMO is still good.

If you make me personally have to play a stealth section in a non-stealth game, go directly to jail. One million years dungeon. Jail for Tetsuya Takahashi for One Thousand Years. And then the boss fight at the end of that section felt like torture to me. Not the one you're supposed to lose, the one immediately before that. If there hadn't been a save point right after it and something had killed me and I'd needed to redo that section I was going to go buy a physical copy of the game just so I could throw it at something.

I dunno, I just have really low tolerance for stuff like that in games these days. I might've gotten along with it better 20 years ago, but then again I might not have. I'm still fine with how Baten Kaitos plays, and they made that around the same time. The things about how Xenosaga plays that remind me of similar mechanics in Xenogears (or just general vibes around how encounters are tuned) just aren't fun for me anymore though, if they ever were.

It's interesting to look at as a midpoint between Xenogears and Xenoblade though. I will never understand the people who think the older Xeno games were the best because my experience has been the exact opposite. They were really ambitious back then, but to me Monolith has gotten better at pretty much everything since then.

They've gotten so much better at how they write characters over time. Not that I didn't like the Gears and Saga characters, but the actual writing and dialogue for them just doesn't compare to their newer stuff like in XC3. Same for their storytelling in general, which has always been full of excellent ideas, but the actual execution was less consistent back in the day.

If I wanted to complain about more specific stuff I could, like that I forgot how for a game with a female protagonist and her ultimate weapon robot (girl) it sure does get pretty "girls be shopping" about gender on a regular basis, but it was 2002, and that was unfortunately par for the course. They still hadn't quite figured out how to not be weird about female characters 15 years later, but at least finally in XC3 and FR they seem to have gotten a handle on it.

And if I wanted to mention more specific things that were good I also could, like how all the little things you can interact with on your first lap around the Woglinde are all relevant again in a meaningful way during the escape. Even now there are still games that struggle to do that in a way that doesn't feel contrived.

Maybe I'll just watch the cutscenes again or something as a refresher since it's been a while, and I'm really curious if they're actually going to tie things in with the Xenoblade games after all the extremely un-subtle references in FR and the latest XCXDE trailer. I think I'm ok at this point not finishing the games myself though.

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Ok just kidding, apparently I'm still going through older stuff that's taken me years to get around to playing.

The Swapper is probably the current champion for ugliest game I've played so far this year. The puzzles seem decent enough (even if they're a bit awkward using a controller), and there's something potentially interesting going on in the world, but it's physically uncomfortable for me to look at it. Everything is so blown out and blurry and looks absolutely awful. It's weird because the designs of things, while not terribly interesting, seem totally fine, but it's the effects on top of that that make it unbearable for me. Like yeah there are plenty of other games from that time period that went overboard with depth of field and bloom and stuff too, but in addition to that the implementation of them in this seems particularly bad. Turning them off in the settings definitely helps, but it still doesn't look great.

Super Mario Galaxy 2 is...complicated. I never played it on my Wii because the disc drive started acting funny before the game was even out. I made a decent chunk of the way into the game in an emulator years later, but I stopped eventually because a 360 controller and a mouse is an awkward combination for certain sections. It works a lot better on the Steam Deck, where there are better options for the pointer like using the gyro or one of the trackpads, but I still don't think I'm finishing it. It's just so weird that even though their flagship series like Mario and Zelda desperately need good camera controls they made a controller that just has no reasonable way to control the camera (sorry, the d-pad doesn't really count). Between that and needing to point at stuff I'm just not having a good enough time to keep going even though the level design is good and it still looks great. I could pair an actual wiimote with my computer now that the drivers are better and I have bluetooth that's fully compatible with it, but I don't think I'll bother. There'll probably be a new 3D Mario by the end of the year anyway, and if they keep experimenting with stuff like they did in Odyssey and Bowser's Fury it'll probably be great.

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Before I forget I should say something about a couple more things.

GoNNER is definitely weirder than I expected (in a good way), or at least I somehow managed to completely forget anything I knew about it between it coming out and this week. I can appreciate what they're going for with it, but I don't think it's really my thing. I just didn't quite click with how it feels to play, but I think it's mostly just a personal taste thing and not anything it's doing wrong.

Spelunky took me approximately forever to get around to trying, and I do not like it. Still mostly personal taste with this one, but I definitely had a stronger negative reaction than I usually do, and to most things about it. I don't like how it feels, I don't really like the art style, the music was kind of irritating me...the list just keeps going. It feels like I'm playing a PC platformer from 30-40 years ago, but in a bad way, not a nostalgic way (not that I have any nostalgia for them, because even back then I thought they all felt terrible compared to what was going on with console platformers). On the plus side that thought led to me remembering Lode Runner exists (which I would also probably not enjoy playing now, so I won't go back to it and ruin it).

QP Shooting - Dangerous!! is the one of these that's actually both good and I like it. I'm not particularly good at it because it's a fairly traditional bullet hell game, and my vision is acting weirder this week, which is not a great combination. Thank you for Conquest mode existing, which lets you save your progress after each level, because I'm not going to 1CC this (it has no continues so that's your only option) even on easy when I'm seeing between two and seven of everything right now.

I think for now this might conclude me digging stuff out of the depths of my Steam library that's been hiding there for years, but there's always more like that the next time I'm in the mood.

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A few more I dropped pretty quickly:

Enter the Gungeon: It only took me like a decade to get around to it, and it's not my thing. I don't think it really did anything particularly wrong in the little bit I played, but something about the way it feels to play just didn't click with me even though I've enjoyed similar games. Seems like a fine game for someone else (like my friend who spent nearly 500 hours on it), just not for me. Also it took me until today to realize it's meant to be gun + dungeon because I am very smart. In my defense, if you put the word "gunge" right there in your name that's what I'm going to think of first.

Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night: It feels like someone said hey, remember Castlevania? What if we did that again, but we made everything about it slightly worse? The most recent Castlevania game I played was replaying Aria of Sorrow a year or two ago, and that still looks much better and feels tighter to control than this did. Mostly this just made me want to play the other GBA/DS Castlevanias I haven't played, and I quit out of the game in the middle of the first boss fight and uninstalled it because it just wasn't doing anything for me.

DmC: Devil May Cry: And you're not going to believe this, but this one made me want to finish getting caught up on Platinum's stuff instead, because I'm still not quite done with Astral Chain and haven't played Bayonetta 3 yet. It feels mostly fine to play, just less good than something like Bayonetta 2 did, but wow is everything else just so much less my thing. It is not a pretty game, and what I saw of the characters and story was a lot less compelling, at least partly because it's trying to take itself seriously and be edgy and ironically detached instead of the campiness of Bayonetta. Also neither Capcom nor Platinum had figured out how to make a UI or menus that were any good yet at this point. They're functional, but beyond that they displease me. I didn't last very long with this one either.

On the plus side, it only took an hour or two for me to cross off three things that had been lurking in my Steam library for like a decade. I need to remember to do this more often. It's always good to take a day and blast through the first 15-30 minutes of like a dozen different games to see if any of them are worth playing beyond that, and I haven't done that enough lately.

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Two more while I'm at it:

Ultionus: A Tale of Petty Revenge is fine, I guess. I finally got around to trying it after it malingering in my Steam library for like a decade. It definitely does capture the feel of 80s and early 90s side-scrolling run and gun shmups pretty well, for better and worse. It looks and feels and sounds pretty decent, but the only thing that really stands out compared to the original games from back then is that you play as Tits McGee.

Word Factori is definitely a lot more noteworthy and more fun though. It's a pretty traditional Zachlike, but the core gimmick of having to create all letters by starting with only the letter I and mangling them/sticking multiple of them together is very clever, very easy to intuitively understand, and has obvious built in goals figuring out how to construct the alphabet and use it to spell words, along with the usual possibilities for optimization of layouts. It's on the short side for the genre and not too difficult to just make it through the levels if you're not optimizing for high scores, but it's still pretty satisfying anyway.

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I appear to have played a couple more games. Rejoice.

Viewfinder is probably one of the best things I've played so far this year. It kind of reminds me of the Portal games if they were more serious instead of being comedies. That kind of first person puzzle solving by manipulating your environment though, with the story told through dialogue from unseen characters. It does a pretty good job of exploring the possibilities of its mechanics even if it never gets super hard (aside from the last level, but that's because of the timer, which you can disable (although you shouldn't have to, because it shouldn't be done in a way that makes the game un-fun in the first place)), kind of like the single player of Portal 2.

It's also one of the prettier things I've played recently. Thank you someone finally hearing my pleas for putting more non-photorealistic rendering styles to use. Some of them really get neglected even though they've been around since the early 00s if I remember right. I think that's when I saw them pop up in something at SIGGRAPH anyway.

HoloCure - Save the Fans! is pretty close to being pretty good. Maybe I'm a bit biased against it by having pretty low knowledge of Hololive going into it, but I think it's mostly mechanically that I have issues with it. I do enjoy a bunch of stuff about playing it, and it has some fun abilities and interactions and stuff, but progression just felt kinda weird to me.

The jumps in difficulty from one level to the next feel enormous, which makes metaprogression upgrades pretty valuable. They're very expensive though, which makes money even more important, and the quickest way I could find to get money was from random side content minigame stuff. I could spend 20-25 minutes on a run that gets me like 10k of whatever the currency is, or I could go spend a few minutes mining and chopping wood and craft something that sells for at least that much, or later on for like 40-200k each. Why is the most efficient way to play the game, like by a couple orders of magnitude, to not play the game?

And there was some info I wanted to be able to check while in the middle of a run that I couldn't, which made it more annoying to keep track of what objectives and unlocks I was going for next. It's pretty cute though. I'll give it that.

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Ok, I'm going to be right up front with the biggest problem with this one: the translation for Noctuary is good enough to finish and enjoy the game, but it's kinda rough. Considering it's like 3/4 visual novel and 1/4 action game, that's a lot of text you have to be ok with reading that's frequently awkwardly worded and very occasionally completely wrong. It would benefit strongly from another proofreading/editing pass from a native English speaker, but I know that's expensive and time consuming when you're working with that much text.

Anyway aside from that it was pretty good and better than I expected.

It has a moderately large cast, and pretty much all of them grew on me by the end. I don't think any of them reach blorbo status, but I enjoyed spending time with them and seeing them interact and how they developed. A whole bunch of them have their own side quest chains that let you get to know them better while also revealing a lot more about the world and what's going on in it, which is good that they generally manage to be interesting and satisfy both of those things, because they're required for the final true ending.

I do think they probably could've shortened the first half of the game significantly though. I get what they were doing with it, but it goes on a bit long before the midpoint where they start gradually revealing more of what's actually going on. I feel like they could've still pulled it off and given you plenty of time to get to know the characters and get used to the status quo before flipping everything upside down in like ten hours instead of the 15 it took me for the first half.

Can't not mention the combat too, since even though the majority of the game is just dialogue, a decent chunk of it isn't.

It's surprisingly decent, and it could be great with a few tweaks. I enjoyed most of the different playstyles available to the two main playable characters and used maybe half of them somewhat regularly. They feel pretty good and are useful in different situations, and the way you can modify them gives you even more options.

Unfortunately nothing feels like it has any impact. I don't know if it needs more liberal use of stuff like hitstop or screenshake or just better audio would help, but it hardly feels like it's doing anything when you hit stuff because the feedback for it is pretty weak. Some things also sometimes don't read as well as they could visually, which makes avoiding some attacks harder than it should be. I also just found it got kind of tedious eventually with how much health stuff has, so I dropped the difficulty to easy somewhere around the end of chapter five (out of six) just to speed things up.

Aside from that the art and music are pretty good too, and it's nice that they were able to have an entire all female (technically, sort of...see below) cast with unique designs without getting weirdly horny about it like so many games do. I also don't get to play games with voice acting in Cantonese very often, so that's nice too. Not that I speak it or anything, but I got used to hearing it from friends' families and in movies and stuff when I was younger.

Ok and about that technically sort of all female cast, they all have feminine features and clothing, and the only pronouns ever used for anyone are she/her, but they exist in a world where sex (both meanings of the word) and gender don't exist. Like it's an actual feature of the world the story takes place in that's part of the worldbuilding and has consequences for the plot, not just someone decided no boys allowed (or the even more common no girls allowed). I had no idea about that before I started playing, so that was an interesting surprise for someone who's also opted out of sex and gender and sexuality.

So yeah, it's pretty good. It's probably better in the original Chinese version, but if it's successful I imagine they'll improve on stuff like translation in future games. I suspect the other stuff will also get better too with what they've learned from this one, so I'm curious what they'll do next after this. In the meantime maybe I'll check out their previous game.

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I seem to have managed to play a few more things recently, but one might get its own post, so I guess I'll just do two of them for now.

life is not auto is a very silly idea that works better than I expected. It's basically "you are now breathing manually" the game, where you have to press several different buttons in time with prompts on the screen to manually activate the character's various organs to keep them alive. Cute pixel art, ok music, and a whole bunch of different ways to die from organ failure. Also it's surprisingly hard, and I'm not very good at it. Still fun anyway though.

Star Survivor feels like it doesn't deserve quite so many really harsh negative reviews on Steam as it has. Yeah it's got some stuff in it that's a bit unfinished, and yeah it could definitely do with some polish too, but I had a decent amount of fun with what's there. I'd put it somewhere in the middle of the pack out of bullet heaven games I've played. I've had a much worse time with a number of others, including Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor (which I still don't understand why anyone likes that one). It has some fun weapons/upgrades with ridiculous interactions between them, and it feels pretty good when you figure out a good combo and make it work. If anyone were still working on it and fixed a few bugs and cleaned up some UI issues and stuff it could be pretty decent. It could really use the equivalent of loading screen tips somewhere too though, maybe on the main menu or something, because there's definitely stuff it needs to explain better.

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I regret to inform the zero people who actually read my posts that I made the poor decision to ignore my new policy of trying to stop pretending I might actually get along with AAA games. In my defense the Saints Row reboot was steeply discounted when I got it, like only a few bucks, and I was curious what they did with it because I had a lot of fun with 3 and 4 and even Gat Out of Hell.

The short version is that it sucks, but not because of the stuff I saw the most complaints about.

I didn't get super far into it, but the change in setting and tone and all of that is all totally fine with me. I have no problem with woke DEI Saints Row, and I can dig the southwestern/Latino vibes too. No idea if the story is any good because I didn't see much of it, but what I did see of the main cast in that time I liked enough. They seem like they have potential.

The problem is that all the gameplay just feels awful compared to the old games.

I don't particularly care about realism or immersion or whatever else The Gamers go on about, especially if it comes at the expense of gameplay feel. Give me worse animations and just have my character snap between poses if it means the controls are tighter.

The older SR games (and most games in general back then) were much better about that. Driving was responsive, combat was snappy, and I could pretty easily tell what was going on at any given time (unless the whole screen was on fire and I had managed to clip halfway through a tank or something, but that's another matter entirely).

In this one it's all just so loose and floaty. Driving is tolerable, but I don't like it very much. The bike in the tutorial though is just terrible. It steers like a boat for some reason instead of turning tighter than cars do like in most games. And combat feels so much worse to me too. I'm not a huge fan of using an analog stick to aim, but I don't remember having too much of a problem with it in the older games (although it did bias me toward using melee weapons and AoE attacks a lot more). I was really struggling to hit stuff in this one though. Sometimes the autoaim will lock onto stuff when I'm barely even pointed in the same direction, and sometimes I can be off by like a single pixel and just can't get it to land a single shot.

It also feels like it does a much worse job of actually communicating what's going on, like I never had this much trouble seeing where I was meant to turn in SR3 or such a hard time telling what I was getting attacked by from where.

On top of that the world just feels a lot more empty. Maybe more stuff opens up later, but if I'm just running from one location to the next on foot because it's only a block or two away there's nothing in between. If you don't have enough stuff to fill your open world with, make it half the size but twice as dense. Please.

And I feel pretty confident making these comparisons to the older games because I replayed a bit of them in the past few years just to see if they still hold up. They're far from perfect, but they're still fun and very playable compared to this attempt at a reboot.

On the plus side the character creator is still excellent. Most others still haven't caught up to what SR3 let you do way back in 2011. I went in without a plan and ended up accidentally creating Prince if Prince was trans but you couldn't tell which direction they were transitioning, and that barely even scratches the surface of what kind of stuff you can get away with in terms of gender and body types. It's not perfect, but it's so much better than most games manage.

There's some neat stuff going on in there, but unfortunately I just absolutely can't stand playing it as a game. This is an interactive medium. Please make stuff feel better to actually interact with.

[veebs-hates-video-games]

While I'm here I should also mention (the) Gnorp Apologue.

It's a relatively short clicker/incremental game (in the sense that you can finish it in a day, but it'll still probably take several hours, not all of that actively playing), and it's enjoyably silly. It's full of different flavors of Little Guy with good pixel art to represent them all, and the mechanics and progression are fairly smooth and satisfying, with different options and ways to solve the main problem the game presents you with that are more or less effective. The ending was a little underwhelming, but I mostly enjoyed the process of getting there and seeing how broken I could make different combinations of gnorps and upgrades be together.

[veebs-hates-video-games]

Oops, I think I forgot to mention Piczle Cross Adventure when I finished it recently, so here's that.

I somehow ended up with all of the games in the Narrative Nonograms bundle on Steam separately without buying the bundle, and now that I've finished all three I think I'd say this is my second favorite (which isn't a bad thing considering how much I liked Pixel Puzzle Makeout League). If you'd asked me before playing any of them I would've guessed Murder by Numbers would be my favorite of the three instead of my least favorite. Go figure.

Anyway, this one is pretty cute with fun pixel art, and some of the music is pretty catchy too, and the story is silly enough to keep things going. I also always enjoy it when there's a character who's a young girl who's a total gremlin, so that worked for me too. And the puzzles do from time to time lean into "doesn't look like anything until color is added after you complete it" territory, but overall it mostly does a reasonably good job of relying on that too much, and the puzzles themselves are decent. None of them get super challenging even at the end, but I'm pretty ok with that with how many of them there are.

Overall? It's pretty good! Not my favorite, but I had a fun enough time with it. Oh, and also it has some good QoL/accessibility features that I'm definitely going to miss in similar games in the future.

[veebs-hates-video-games]

Ok, while I'm here there's another thing I've given up on to start the new year. Congratulations to the Trails series for being the latest entire series to get completely banished 🎉

I really tried, and I don't doubt that the huge overarching story both exists and is plenty interesting, but after trying to play two different games in the series neither clicked for me. The original Trails in the Sky last year seemed kind of interesting but felt too dated for what I'm willing to put up with right now, so I was hoping the remake would help. In the meantime I jumped forward to Trails of Cold Steel, and it's just not doing it for me.

I made it several hours in and through roughly the first chapter or so, and I'm straight up not having a good time. It's not even because there's anything particularly bad about it, but the much hyped stuff that's supposed to be good about it either still hasn't shown up or just isn't my thing.

The characters are fine, but none of them grabbed me enough to make me feel like I need to spend more time with them and find out what their deals are or see what happens to them. What I saw of the story is fine and might go somewhere, but up until the point I reached it's pretty standard and doesn't stand out in any way. The battle system...exists. It's functional, but I don't find it very satisfying.

Basically there's a reason why when I took a bit of a break from it and started playing Yakuza: Like a Dragon I stuck with that until I finished it instead and had a really hard time getting back into this one afterward, and that reason is that Yakuza: Like a Dragon does basically everything better than Trails of Cold Steel (at least what I've seen of it anyway).

The characters and story and writing in general are immediately compelling and hooked me instantly. The turn-based combat is fairly similar in a lot of ways, but it's even simpler. The difference is that it feels much better to actually use. I think a lot of that just comes down to much better animations and stuff happening a lot quicker in general so the pace of battle feels snappier.

And sure that's a much newer game, but other Falcom stuff from around the same time period like Ys 8 also starts off much stronger and feels much better to interact with, so I know there were people working there at the time who could manage to do that. I think it also helped that it had a more unique setting than yet another anime high school, and that allowed for more variety in party members. It would be pretty funny to see Sahad attending anime high school though, like still as a middle aged man with nothing about him changed.

I dunno. It's kind of a bummer. I was really excited about Trails because it kept coming up in conversations about other stuff I really like like Xenoblade, but now that I finally got around to it after saying I was going to for like a decade I think it's just not for me.

[veebs-hates-video-games]

I think I'm done enough with a couple more things.

Like I've mentioned before, Hi-Fi Rush does so many things really well. It's one of maybe two and a half rhythm games I've ever played that aren't explicitly just rhythm games and have other things going on that actually manages to successfully combine the music and the rest of the game and world, and it's the one with by far the biggest budget (the other two are 140 and arguably Vectronom).

It's unfortunately the one I enjoy playing the least, but it's so satisfying seeing the way every single animation in the entire game and the timing of everything all lines up with the music. Even though I wasn't into actually playing it enough to finish more than maybe half of it, I'm still mad the studio got shut down, because you can tell from every inch of the game how much they cared about it.

On the plus side, not playing any more of it after this means I don't get jumpscared by the Bethesda logo every time I launch the game anymore (I have an entirely negative and antagonistic relationship with Bethesda even though I have several friends who love their stuff).

And then there's Nordic Ashes: Survivors of Ragnarok, which is pretty ok but not great, and kept falling into "why am I still playing this?" territory. Like there isn't much in particular wrong with it if you're into that sort of game (aside from some aspects of progression being unreasonably grindy even for what it is), and there are some things it even does pretty well, but it only really all comes together now and then.

When it does work it's pretty satisfying, and it gets into a good rhythm with so much stuff to constantly run around the map to do that there's never really much standing around waiting for stuff to happen. I just also kept ending up in situations where things I tried to do with builds would work great in one case and not at all in another slightly different one, and there wasn't any obvious reason what made that weapon or upgrade or whatever work so differently and not contribute anywhere near as much.

Trying out all the new stuff I unlocked was fun, and so was trying to learn different characters' abilities to see how far I could push them, but that pretty quickly gets into a state where there's very little available progression that isn't like "kill 18 billion of this one specific enemy" so you get like 10% closer to being able to afford another upgrade in the permanent upgrade tree, and there are dozens of them that are equally as boring and tedious as that. And don't worry, the UI for them is awful too, with them all just dumped into one giant list that scrolls far too slowly and doesn't even have a way to jump from one category to the next.

If progression were faster and more consistent and the big, ugly checklist menus were sorted in any sort of reasonable way and easier to navigate it would be be pretty good, because it does a lot of the other stuff well enough. Well, aside from the dash being garbage and feeling bad on most characters, and seemingly their only solution to preventing bosses from getting instakilled on higher difficulties is giving them long enough invincibility phases that it gets boring (which is a shame because some of them have some decent mechanics going on aside from that, at least for this genre).