What is the last video game you played?

[Quintus 5,399]

8 hours ago, Docteur Qui said:

 

Unless it depicts Paul Atreides as jacked and wearing an outfit that shows his massive junk I'm not interested. 😤

 

If in some game they made this optional, I doubt players would give a fuck. I mean, Saints Row already sort of gets there, ten years ago. 

 

Has anyone seen the character creation tool of MMO Black Desert? According to Steam reviews, there are players out there who have spent more hours designing hot playable female sword fighters than they have playing the actual game. 

 

This is a huge market being catered to, people even show up at conventions in full cosplay tribute of these characters, and a quick google will demonstrate how ridiculously sexy some of the women (and no doubt the men) can look when they go all out on the costume and makeup emulation at these events. It's a form of expression. They've got it and they'll flaunt it. 

 

These guys and girls aren't going to suddenly stop being catered for by equally pervy game designers. 

 

This latest androgynous character trend is largely publisher driven anyway. By trying to appeal to literally everybody (for DLC skin revenue streams), it's arguable that they risk alienating their original base who made them successful to begin with. Personally, I can take or leave all this stuff, but I appreciate it's a hotly contentious subject right now. 

 

9 hours ago, King Mark said:

Quintus, I'm stuck in Live Service  game hell. 2 years ago I never understood how you could devote so many hours in a game like Destiny 2 . But I'm having the same problem now with Genshin Impact.  I'm just grinding for minimal improvement of my characters and doing daily activities gives me in game currency. . I really need to cut loose of it to return to my normal schedule of single player games

  but they are really expensive

 

Been there. I don't play Destiny anymore outside of the occasional blast on its now stale PVP multiplayer. There comes a point where you just gotta put these things down. Eventually, you will just stop enjoying the gameplay loop, although that's where a basic degree of will power is also required. Don't just load Genshin Impact up by default like many of us used to load JWFan forum when opening our phones. 

 

Look at porn instead. 

 

(or try something else in your backlog) 

[King Mark 3,631]

11 hours ago, Koray Savas said:

 

 

These types of reactionary responses to diversity in storytelling are the issue, along with far left games journalism as you mentioned. But game devs and publishers aren’t forcing this stuff into games because of journalists. People simply exist that want to tell stories with these types of characters.
 

Naughty Dog has carte blanche with PlayStation. No one is forcing these characters into games to avoid journalistic backlash. Your sexy JRPG character design isn’t going to go anywhere. 

 I think it's being forced into games to some degree or will be in the near future . Aperture 2025 is coming to movies soon , requiring that a list of the race, sexual orientation and disability status of the cast and crew be submitted to the Academy to meet diversity requirements to even qualify to be nominated for best movie. This means film makers will have to work within a rigid, top down guideline imposed by the Academy and studios . A lot of beloved classics from the past could never have been made this way. Anyone who calls himself a cinema fan should be horrified by all this and if it comes to pass I think it will be the end of the great movie area because you can never do really great artwork with a preset list of ingredients  and movies will just become a vehicle to promote an agenda.

11 hours ago, Koray Savas said:

 The Last Of Us Part II features masculine, gay, and trans women at the center of its storytelling. All of these narrative details leaked before the game was out, and people have been devouring it for them ever since.

But game devs and publishers aren’t forcing this stuff into games because of journalists. People simply exist that want to tell stories with these types of characters.

 As I said,  I have nothing against TLOU2 because it doesn't fit with what I'm complaining about. I don't see anything that was forced into that game. 

 

Let me give you a specific example of something that would bother me because don't think people understand what I'm trying to say.  If Shift Up Corporation caves in and changes the character model from the Project Eve heroine because crazy feminists from ResetEra and other virtue signalling woke groups complained loudly on Twitter, then that would be a terrible decision . And I do think this type of pressure has affected some game in the past few years and that significant changes have been made to avoid backlash that alienates the original player base of these games.

[Marian Schedenig 8,200]

The thing is, if so many people weren't adamantly refusing to yield any terrain and take any of these concerns seriously, more balanced representation would already be more normal than it is, and people wouldn't have to fight for it and sometimes go overboard with it. On the other side, people who cry "woke extremists" as soon as a homosexual character, or trans character, or unattractive major female character shows up in a game pretty much give up their credibility, even for those cases where they might actually have a better reason for their objections.

 

As long as these things are being kept controversial and people feel underrepresented, of course those games/films/books that take up these topics will get special attention, and will possibly have extra appeal to many affected people, even if they have none (or even less than none) to you.

 

You also seem to keep "blaming" journalists for everything, neglecting that these issues are also supported by studios, developers, and writers, especially female ones and diverse teams (e.g. Rhianna Pratchett and Double Fine), both in discourse and in development.

 

Video games are an art form, and art has always been both a form of entertainment and a vehicle for dealing with social (and other) issues, sometimes mores, sometimes less. Especially games as the probably only fully interactive art form (in its finished form) can allow their players to identify with and "be" the characters they're playing. These games have traditionally been targeted almost exclusively to heterosexual male players and embraced all their fetishes. These days, games have begun to do just what Roddenberry did on the original Star Trek: Give previously underrepresented people their share of the spotlight, so that they too can find characters to identify with. And as Goldberg and Burton have pointed out, to those affected this can be huge deal, and actively change their lives. So naturally it's important to them, and people who support them, yet it is still constantly painted as a huge extremist conspiracy with a supposedly baseless "agenda" by those who are much, much less affected by it and just want their games to be escapes from reality that cater to only their tastes. While those marginalised people who have much deeper, personal struggles with their harsh realities, and have even more need for that kind of escape in their entertainment, are denied even that when every game, without cause or context, directly confronts them with all their real world struggles emphasised a hundred times, just to cater to those who already oppose them in real life.

[King Mark 3,631]

 

You want all games to have elements that appeal to marginalised people because Star Trek set some sort of gold standard to how everything should be made ? That all sounds very noble but sometimes you seem to be grandstanding from a distance.  I've been a part of this thread for a long time and I know you like point and click games from the 90's, but have you played any recent mainstream games ? Speaking for myself I have a notepad with all the games I played since 2009 and I completed 241 games from start to finish, most of them with a 60 hour+ playtime, so I think that qualifies me as a hard core gamer

 

Of course SOME games should to be made to appeal to underrepresented or marginalised groups (like TLOU2 for example), but not all  games should be forced to or try to shoehorn elements to please or include everyone (which unfortunately is the direction I think were heading into because of virtue signalling putting pressure on developers ) . Multiracial casts like Star Trek and representation of marginalised groups just doesn't work in everything or can even be a huge detriment to the story your trying to tell. 

[Marian Schedenig 8,200]

35 minutes ago, King Mark said:

You want all games made to appeal to marginalised people because Star Trek set some sort of gold standard to how everything should be made ?

 

No. But I will call out when people cry end of the world whenever a game caters to anyone else but just lusty male gamers.

 

35 minutes ago, King Mark said:

Sometimes you seem to be grandstanding from a distance. I've been a part of this thread for a long time and I know you like point and click games from the 90's, but have you played any recent mainstream games ? 

 

Not many, but some. Though I don't see how my being or not being an active gamer (or film viewer or reader) is relevant to my arguments.

 

35 minutes ago, King Mark said:

I agree SOME games have to be made to appeal to underrepresented or marginalised groups, but not all  games should be forced to incorporate elements to try to please or include everyone (which unfortunately is the direction I think were heading into) .

 

That's what you keep saying, while at the same time you keep arguing against the mere idea that people might criticise game X for ignoring them. We're not arguing about every single game. And again you bring up games being forced. By whom? By the "woke journos", when their points are often the same as those of many gamers, or in fact developers and writers? By the gamers themselves? They've always "forced" the direction of big budget games - because studios won't make big budget games unless people will buy them. If so many gamers want representation that a studio decides to implement it against their initial plans because they want to reach those gamers as well, and you're complaining that they get their less objectified character models instead of you getting your objectified ones, because you the game to cater to your personal ideal escapism fantasy which is fundamentally at odds with that of many others, who is trying to force whom?

 

Essentially, you're complaining about critics (professional critics, amateur critics, and gamers themselves) because they supposedly "force" games to be something, while you want to force them to stay something else. And when game X is "threatened", you complain that all games have to be a certain way. But by far not all games are like that (otherwise people couldn't criticise them for not being like that in the first place), and in fact most games have been and many still represent "your" way, not "theirs". And not all games should be forced to incorporate elements to try to please or include *you* at the expense of others.

 

But ultimately, I'm just repeatedly trying to rephrase my original point that you can't (in my view) insist one mass entertainment art cater to you at the expense of others without even conceding to them a valid reason for more often catering to them, or for not wanting to be objectified by a majority of games (and further by gamers who refuse to even acknowledge that this issue exists and might be relevant to those being objectified). So unless this turns into an actual, reasonable discussion after all, I'll try to refrain from repeating myself yet again and instead see if Cyberpunk 2077 runs on my system (how's that for a recent mainstream game with highly sexualised content?) (It works pretty well on the Steam Deck, but while 800p is fine for the portable screen, this kind of game deserves to be played on a proper screen with a higher resolution)

[King Mark 3,631]

But you admit to not playing many games and it doesn't seem like you really understand what the gaming culture is. I play games every day and visit gaming websites to read up on recent gaming news and even read a lot of the comment sections too. You absorb it and after a while it adds up and you start noticing trends. I can see a lot of censorship happening with many titles now and it's been getting worse in the past 2-3 years and this is done mostly as a cave in to virtue signalling pressure groups at the expense of the fans who made the games popular in the first place.  And about 90% of the people in the articles comment sections are expressing concerns about woke changes ruining their games so this is a real thing and not just me.

 

[Quintus 5,399]

Re: Zelda Breath of the Wild 

 

It's a smashing game, really relaxing to wind down and unload to in the evenings, I've enjoyed it a fair bit; it is exceptionally rare for me to play and complete a game of this size these days, so it clearly got a lot right. It's utterly beautiful, too, in parts: for example, I was spellbound by the visual atmosphere of the Lost Woods and the hidden little village in its centre - but one stunning locale in an enormous world choc full of rich visual style, it really is a marvel this sprawling expanse that they created, even by modern open world design standards. Very cool stuff then, and from a 2017 release on an underpowered and forgotten console system.

 

I was thinking, it must be quite heartbreaking for the graphics artists working on these Nintendo platforms to see their originally superior high fidelity work eventually stripped of pixels in order to make the games run on underpowered hardware. I appreciate that Zelda adventures hold a degree of visual charm despite their low res, jaggie-edge final forms, but after playing Breath of the Wild in 4K OLED with nary a shimmering staircase polygonal edge in sight (picture perfect crystal clear fidelity), well it really just makes the artwork shine, a huge appreciation being felt for the talent and craft behind it. I've always loved good graphics and visual flair in games, and Breath of the Wild is probably brimming with a not insignificant amount of unnoticed polish in that regard. It's almost a shame really. Maybe one day they'll remaster it - they could literally just up the resolution and send it out and people would assume the thing had received a full overhaul. 

 

But it's not all good, and certainly isn't the greatest game ever made™, not by a long shot. I'd argue it isn't even one of the best ever. Because there are some baffling design choices going on in the background, and I of course think they're worth calling out:

 

The Master Sword is absolutely pointless as a central quest reward, it's a crap weapon and I think an insult to the legendary weapon's status as seen in past instalments. In BOTW's disposable weapon setup, the Master Sword is redundant. This irony of the one unbreakable weapon in the game also being entirely disposable is... regrettable. 

 

Horses aren't fun and feel like an afterthought which were shoehorned in the result of there being an expectation to see them in a Zelda game, particularly an open world one. Simply, they just handle badly. I've played a Battlefield game which had better controlled and more exciting horse riding. Shame on you Nintendo! I ended up leaving mine at the stables. 

 

Combat is remarkably very sloppy. Bomb spamming isn't fun fighting mechanics, but it feels necessary in many encounters, with weapons breaking very quickly (a controversial design choice, it turns out) and slash timing that demands highly exact inputs for a broadly mainstream game of its type. Early game, being near one-shot by enemies doesn't feel like Nintendo and feels more like Bethesda or even From Software. Much time is spent pausing and unpausing the action, but more on that later. Enemy lethality early on and even later can be like a cheap, arbitrary challenge. Dodge timing is promoted as a core aspect of the melee combat, but using these attack evasion moves is not intuitive nor particularly satisfying, in fact they'll get you killed where simple turtling or circling/backflipping will keep you in the fight. I'd say that overall I didn't much enjoy the fighting in this game. That's just... bizarre? 

 

The inventory system is woefully bad. If it weren't for Skyrim before it, I'd even go as far as calling item management in BOTW an industry worst. Quickly locating and retrieving items in the UI is an absolute shitshow. Exaggerating much? I don't think I am, not when you compare this inventory system to countless other games on the market. For example, why did Nintendo feel the need to reinvent the radial wheel? We're talking about CONSTANT gameplay pauses here; just selecting healing (food) during combat is terrible for gameplay ebb and flow and I find it shocking that this happens in a Nintendo game, let alone a marquee Zelda release. 

 

Elixirs are pointless (or food is, depending on your "poison" of choice in the game). Because food and monster ingredients appear to perform the exact same function as each other and so what happens is you end up with a load of junk to endlessly scroll through, half of which essentially has no purpose but to be sold to merchants. They could have sped up inventory management by focusing on one or the other, instead of offering all this superficial choice under the guise of it being some sort of deep crafting system. It isn't, although I admit I found the cooking animation charming. 

 

In addition, inventory tabs are also very unintuitive in the way they are laid out and labelled. I was regularly pressing the wrong button in search of a particular screen. 

 

Constant rain. I see enough rain in real life and would have preferred to largely escape it in a lush world full of rolling valleys, but I frequently couldn't appreciate the sights due to it constantly pissing down and the drizzly atmosphere greatly dimming and obscuring vision, and the spectacle. It makes for a miserable mood, as open world games go. At its worst, prolonged heavy downpours have the effect of making the nighttime feel doubly as long - when it's actually 12 noon. I almost modded the rain out, but I ultimately settled for "preserve the artist's original vision", even if it intrusively sucked. 

 

Music isn't up to the legacy of the series. Lacking in variety, I found it to be tedious, with simplistic piano ruminations making up the brunt of the experience. Now don't get me wrong, there are nice cues in here, but come on they are few and far between. Yes, I get that the sparing use of music and its frugal instrumentation is intended to bring an air of "the lonely wild" to proceedings, but I don't think it worked that well. "But the heavy thematics of past titles wouldn't suit the lonely bygone derelictions of this Zelda world!" Nonsense, there are tracks that sound like those classics in this game, and when they play they suddenly bring the world alive. But they are fleeting. For my money, the musical design in BOTW is counterintuitive to the overall sense of place and journey across its vast lands. The score is oddly quite small in scope. I bet others would reword that as "more personal", which I understand but don't agree with. 

 

Blood moon is an underutilised mechanic. It literally has no effect on my behaviour or approach, I never saw or felt its influence at any point in the game. More redundancy, very strangely in a Nintendo title.

 

And a final criticism... 

SHRINES ARE NO REPLACEMENT FOR DUNGEONS. God they're dull. However, the Divine Beasts were... alright. I liked how they played their part in the threadbare story's lore and the grand climax when they were ready for the final assault, that was very cool. But still, please bring back proper dungeons in the next game. I've left about thirty five shrines in BOTW unexplored, many of them discovered but left untouched on the map. I don't need the hearts and they're too boring to be bothered with now. 

 

With all that comprehensive negativity, then, how come I still played this game through to completion? Well in the end, it's the old case of the "sum of its parts"  total package: the game undeniably has a sort of mystical abstract appeal that while not that difficult to pin down, is not something I'm going to bore you with further in an attempt at flowery waxing lyrical about. About how it all just seems to pull together, as a complete adventurous package, flaws and all. Ultimately, there's just something highly compelling about picking away at this massive world's delightfully playful and extremely sophisticated open world physics based sandbox. It's a chill time to be had. 

 

Sorry for distilling the experience down in a way which might seem rather soulless and technically obsessed, but my angle with finer games is you can never have the magic without a lot of nuts and bolts, and I've always been appreciative of both. After all is said and done, I think of Breath of the Wild as being a good Zelda game, but not the best in the series, or in the adventure genre at large.

 

 

 

 

[King Mark 3,631]

That's why you should try Genshin Impact. The gameplay is obviously very inspired by BOTW except the graphics and locales are really stunning and the combat system is amazing. The exploration and sense of discovery are some of the best I ever experienced and I got hooked within minutes of trying the game and that's why I'm still playing it after 2 years (even though I should stop). Also has my favorite musical score for a videogame and the best story cinematic cut scenes I've ever seen.

 

Quite a few reviewers made point by point comparisons between BotW and Genshin Impact and prefer Genshin

[Quintus 5,399]

Nah. I'm going to take a break from this sort of thing and have a blast through Guardians of the Galaxy instead. 

[King Mark 3,631]

10 minutes ago, Quintus said:

 

 

I was thinking, it must be quite heartbreaking for the graphics artists working on these Nintendo platforms to see their originally superior high fidelity work eventually stripped of pixels in order to make the games run on underpowered hardware

 

 that's my # 1 problem with Nintendo and stopped me from buying a console from them. If you think that was bad just imagine Xenoblade Chronicles for the WII

[Quintus 5,399]

CEMU Emulator feels like a divine blessing from above for the prettier looking past Nintendo titles in that regard. It makes their games look brand new. 

 

Soon, I'm going to move onto Wind Waker. I hear that one is pretty special, at least after the Wii U edition quality of life improvements they brought to it. 

 

Breath of the Wild is actually the first Zelda game I've played and finished since Ocarina of Time. 

[Disco Stu 15,495]

I used horses a lot in BOTW because of how little control they needed.  Very convenient for traveling long distances in areas I didn't have a lot of warp points in yet.  If you're on a path you don't need to steer them at all.

[Quintus 5,399]

I know what you mean but I found them to be too cumbersome on anything but rolling hills geometry and in the end more hassle than they're worth. They're also only good for the start of one's most recent expedition, since leaving them behind for a quick explore off the beaten track inevitably renders them unusable due to their player follow limitations. 

[Faleel 5,356]

It was fun using food to run like a madman half naked through death mountain to get to the flame armor guy.

[Not Mr. Big 4,639]

In general, I hate breakable items in video games.  It turns everything into a constant grind 

 

[Quintus 5,399]

For me it never doesn't have the effect of making me hoard my best kit, without ever using it. I'll keep using my lower tier stuff while saving my stronger more powerful weapons for some big tough encounter which never happens. Right now in my inventory I have swords which blow all of the other items away, and I've never used them.

 

I think it was a bad direction for BOTW to go in, at least for me.

[Disco Stu 15,495]

It feels like such an integral part of the game, I don't really know what they do other than just tweak the existing weapons system for the next game.  Once I figured out the kind of weapons I liked using it wasn't so bad.  On repeat playthroughs (I've started the game over 4 times) I just prioritize unlocking as many weapon slots as possible as early as possible and I tend to only keep like one spear(I don't like them much but it's good to have one handy in certain situations), one long sword, two slots for tools (torch/axe/deku leaf), and everything else is short swords (I'm an inveterate button masher, what can I say).

 

I never found hoarding them especially useful.

[Disco Stu 15,495]

Very late to the game here but I started playing Jedi: Fallen Order over the weekend (on Series X) and am quite enjoying it.  No one told me it was a platformer!

[Quintus 5,399]

It starts out so promising but goes nowhere I hadn't been countless times before. Didn't finish it. 

[Disco Stu 15,495]

I'm enjoying the platforming sections and the exploration/finding secrets the most.

[Quintus 5,399]

See how far you get. I think I got to the third planet. 

 

Actually, Guardians of the Galaxy isn't itself that far, far away. Everyone raves about it, yet I'm so far unconvinced. But I'll keep at it a little longer before making a call. 

[Disco Stu 15,495]

I'm near the end of the first main planet I think (starts with Z... Zeffo or something?).  I'm excited for a depiction of Dathomir that isn't the ugly-ass TCW visual style.

[SilverTrumpet 638]

I really liked Fallen Order, and the OST was one of the best in Star Wars video games. 

 

The game definitely goes on for too long, though. I think it's just one of those AAA game mandates that are too common today. I remember doing so much sliding (which hides loading screens, like how other games use squeezing through walls to hide loading), and just how tired it was after awhile. Shave a few hours off the game and it would be considered up there with some of the best of Star Wars.

 

The ending sequence is freaking incredible, but I know lots of people who never made it to the end because about two thirds of the way through the game they get burnt out. 

[Disco Stu 15,495]

When I've noticed the music it just sounded like imitations of Williams temp, nothing special.  But maybe I just wasn't paying close enough attention.

[Holko 9,529]

I 100%ed it twice

[bored 309]

3 hours ago, Stu said:

When I've noticed the music it just sounded like imitations of Williams temp, nothing special.  But maybe I just wasn't paying close enough attention.

 

The music is one of the better Star Wars scores I've heard in the last few years. I really like the main theme for Cal, there's a good emotional theme for his crew, nice playful motif for the droid, an admittedly too simplistic theme for the second inquisitor, and some really good action cues. 

 

It also utilizes past Williams material very well, with the Force theme being used very sparingly, and thankfully no use of the Star Wars / Luke theme. Some of the motifs from the prequels have some clever reuses like "Palpatine's Instructions" and when Cal is training with his master before Order 66 you can hear bits of the Descent motif from "Anakin's Betrayal" and "Anakin Changes". 

 

It's just a shame the story of that game goes nowhere, and a certain character who definitely should have been killed off is arbitrarily kept alive at the end. 

[Faleel 5,356]

6 hours ago, Stu said:

 I'm excited for a depiction of Dathomir that isn't the ugly-ass TCW visual style.

This isn't the game your looking for

[Jay 37,369]

Square Enix sells off Tomb Raider, Deus Ex IPs and the studios behind them - Embracer Group to acquire Eidos, Crystal Dynamics, and Square Enix Montreal

[King Mark 3,631]

is that bad?

5 hours ago, SilverTrumpet said:

 

 

The game definitely goes on for too long, though. I think it's just one of those AAA game mandates that are too common today.

 I think  games should be as long as possible.

[Quintus 5,399]

I think games should be as long as they need to be. 

[SilverTrumpet 638]

16 hours ago, King Mark said:

is that bad?

 I think  games should be as long as possible.

 

Do you feel the same about movies? 

[Koray Savas 2,251]

I’d take a solid 15-20 hour game over anything else these days.

 

Horizon Forbidden West was a drag for me at around 60 hours. 

[Quintus 5,399]

Linear story driven campaign wise I'm even quite satisfied with a really effective 5-6 hour affair. 

 

I understand when people are paying silly "next gen" premium pricing for their console games that there's an expectation for expansive long term value, but I'm coming from the angle of a PC player who rarely pays more than a tenner for stuff on Steam and other digital stores. Moreover, I never buy anything till around a year after release anyway. So yeah, a lot of the time I am actually quite grateful for the small mercies of briefer gaming experiences, especially with the size of backlogs we all seem to have piled on ourselves these days. 

 

 

[Docteur Qui 1,544]

Most “long” games are 10 hours of actual gameplay/story and then tens of hours of garbage filler and repetition to puff it up. It’s so obvious when it happens and makes me rarely want to pick the game up again once I’ve finished the main campaign.

 

BOTW is probably the only one I’ve spent over 100 hours on and actually enjoyed the time spent. It’s a delight to play. Zelda games are rarely worth playing for the story anyway.

[Disco Stu 15,495]

I've never played a single game in my life "for the story."  It's a big industry and luckily games being made for pretty much all tastes and preferences.

[Faleel 5,356]

I only "play games for the story" in the sense, that it gives a feeling of progression and purpose, that a level based thing doesn't quite give.

[Marian Schedenig 8,200]

I play games that I do play for the story mostly for the story - which is why I'm always wary of open world games (that aren't sandbox games) that try to make me spend most of my time exploring or on side quests until I lose my interest and never get to see how the story plays out. In these cases, I'm usually in for the immersive storytelling more than the action (which on modern 3D games is mainly aimed at players above my skill level anyway). Cyberpunk right now (which runs wonderfully on the Steam Deck (bugs aside) once you get used to it only being fluent at 720p) is a welcome exception, because I'm actually immersed in both the story and the world - I am currently playing it on easy though, but it looks like a game I might revisit at some point in the future on a tougher setting (likely when have a system that can run it on full quality settings).

 

But I also enjoy many games that have no story, or are entirely abstract, and those I usually do play primarily for the mechanics themselves (although there are also cases here where the abstract world is so well designed visually and/or musically - or conceptually - that the immersion may trump the mechanics). Tetris is still the prime example of an abstract game that works well with or without excessive design, and has such a gripping mechanic that almost all attempts to expand on it (and there have been countless attempts over the years) just end up making it less good.

 

And while I'm talking about abstract games, a special recommendation goes out to the positively mind-boggling Baba is You, which I've also finally started playing on the Deck (it's a game that works best in shorter sessions, and being able to seamlessly switch between the desktop and the portable system is perfect for that sort of thing).

[Quintus 5,399]

At the other end of the spectrum to Stu, here's me who, after years and years of playing countless games in pretty much most genres under the sun, has reached a point where story (or some other clever writing/characterisation device) is now the main driving factor behind my looking into new experiences to be had in the gaming pastime. I'm pretty much "all played out" with regular run-of-the-mill stuff, but I'll still make the effort with anything that is particularly standout, or seems to have very strong common word of mouth. By common I mean regular gamers constantly talking about titles on forums and other channels. I don't trust nor read professional reviews anymore. 

 

I'm currently playing something called Norco, which is a point and click suburban narrative adventure with a semi bleak near future backdrop. 

 

 

[Not Mr. Big 4,639]

The most egregious recent example of a length-padded game that I played was Ass. Creed Odyssey.  The combat and traversal were smooth and satisfying but it gets bogged down in a never-ending uphill grind.  I spent around 80 hours grinding and then it a brick wall where I had to grind more.  

[King Mark 3,631]

 

More woke bullshit.

 

https://dailycaller.com/2017/08/02/nintendo-cuts-sombrero-from-super-mario-following-cultural-appropriation-outrage/

[Marian Schedenig 8,200]

I'd say quoting the Daily Caller rather proves my point. And since this topic, like the Daily Caller, keeps tending towards entitled and toxic whining rather than a sensible discussion, I wonder why it's even allowed to continue on this board.

[JWFan Moderators 100]

JWFan is not the place to discuss the politicalization of video games.

Thank you.

 

[King Mark 3,631]

Fine,  I just needed a mod warning to confirm  that "political discussions" includes alterations and censorship in movies and games because of outraged special interest groups . It's something I feel is VERY important to discuss because it strikes at the very heart of the hobby but since I've been told to shut up I'll try to stick to complaining about unreleased John Williams music.

 

Also I finally scored a PS5 today. Will be trying out Elden Ring . 

 I  got it retail price but forced to buy 2 games at Gamestop

 

I'll install it later but I have extreme  bad luck with electronics so I'm expecting a defective one . If it  works without a hitch for a few weeks I'll breathe easier. I had to trade my PS4 pro once before I got a good one. Also happened with my TV.

 

I will also keep my PS4 pro as a backup console

 

 

[SilverTrumpet 638]

Backup for what?

[King Mark 3,631]

well I have a ton of PS4 games still to play and they might not all work optimally on the pS5

[King Mark 3,631]

ok so the PS5 turned on ok, updated software and set up had no glitches so far. no weird noises or graphics artifacts.

 

Downloading Genshin to test a game.

 

I always find unboxing and initial testing nerve-wracking.

[King Mark 3,631]

PS5 working without any problems so far.

 

For Genshin Impact not much of a difference except better draw distance and frame rate.

 

I installed Immortal Fenryx Rising so I'll start that

[SilverTrumpet 638]

Make sure you play Astro first. 

[King Mark 3,631]

yeah I will

[Koray Savas 2,251]

On 7/5/2022 at 12:11 PM, King Mark said:

well I have a ton of PS4 games still to play and they might not all work optimally on the pS5

99.9% of PS4 games run on PS5.

 

I've been addicted to Nobody Saves The World. Top down action RPG from Drinkbox Studios. Filled with their humorous charm and artistic style, it's got me going straight into NG+