I figured I'd make an /e/ equivalent of that great, big /beat/ thread.
Recently I have been slogging away on XCOM: Enemy Within with the Long War mod. Humanity is doomed as I'm simply incapable of holding back the torrent of battleships the aliens keep hurling at me.
>>26861 I think if you can't move on from Donkey Kong and instead allow it to become a festering wound in your psyche you have ceased to live. I don't understand how these people can't or won't move on.
It looks identical in many ways to mario odyssey doesn't it.
I'm trying to see the Pauline choice from a design perspective and I think it comes from trying to have your cake and eat it in terms of gender marketing, (how do you sell this to girls as well as boys) Little boys will imagine themselves as Donkey Kong, he imbues the action based empowerment that men like. Little girls will imagine themselves as Pauline, instructing and guiding Donkey Kong which is the kind of empowerment women like.
The only thing that is a little odd is the bait and switch in the presentation. I went back and rewatched the original Nintendo direct, and there is no mentioning of her. It seems weird, because it feels like a conspiracy but one that had no point. The only explanation I have is that it was an attempt to direct the flow of conversation by limiting the information presented. By concealing that Pauline is in it they've made the conversation about how Pauline is in it if that was the intention or the streisand effect I don't know.
I've had something of a theory that the controversy about women around Ghostbusters 2016 was a deliberate marketing ploy to get people talking about the movie and I hope that isn't what is going on here because I'd rather marketing didn't perform psyops buy triggering culture war over their products because firstly I want Nintendo to be better than that, and secondly if that is what is going on it should be illegal on ethics grounds. Maybe the slow roll out was an attempt to make the conversation not about that only the marketing team knows the truth and how good marketers are at manipulation is entirely up for debate, they aren't gods, but probably are randomly more successful than people give them credit.
>>26865 I think the point I'm making is quite clear. You and people like you are engaging wholesale with the attention economy, whilst pretending, probably even unto yourselves, that you are somehow subverting it. It's no different to the recent wave of entirely predictable outrage over Sabrina Carpenter and the marketing of her new album. Even if this is a highly sophisticated marketing campaign designed to induce mass hysteria in a specific demographic of the overly online, so what? Are we going to hold a demo in Westminster? Start a decentralized community in the Cairngorms? Perform secular Tatbir on a live stream?
Because if Donkey Kong is causing this much of a headache, driving you to, perhaps facetiously, call for arrests, and generally weighing upon your mind and soul; why not move on? Do you not have any sense of "perhaps me and Mr Kong have drifted apart"?
It seems to be that there is a general cultural stoppage in which even the likes of Donkey Kong, a tertiary platformer mascot from four decades ago, can be a source of profound excitement and outrage. Surely we should instead be asking, if we have to talk about Donkey Kong at all, are they still making those? Should Nintendo be able to have an exclusive copyright for such a long time? Because if Donkey Kong exercises you in such a dreadful way, then why engage at all otherwise?
>>26866 I'm not sure that attempting to decypher the intention of a marketing campaign is the same as engaging with it, if at all 'wholesale'. I suppose I did consider buying a Switch2 because of this conversation, backed up by previous titles I didn't bother buying at the time (speaking of, is the Switch2 back compatible?), but ultimately decided I didn't like the way in which I was being convinced to buy.
I quite liked this story of the games marketing (I didn't follow it myself, relying purely on posts here), with mind to the reactionary chuds - it shows a level of forethought and understanding in defusing tensions. I interpreted it as baiting a troublesome audience into pre-emptively venting their autism, thus have dumped their adrenaline before the reveal, neutralising a great deal of potential flack.
I watch Asmongold a little bit, who's representive of a significant demographic in videogame consumers. It's very easy to imagine this demographics rhetoric and how it could effect perceptions and sales for this game. I even caught myself thinking some of it.
Compare that to the buildup of the Southport riots and how the reports that the offender infact wasn't a muslamic raygun discredited and disrupted the rally. That's not to mention everything else that no doubt went into the management of the affair but I hope you get my point.
>so what? Are we going to hold a demo in Westminster?
Who knows? Maybe. We'd have to talk it out first, right?
It's as though your advocating for apathy more than simply moving on. Who'd want to do that and why?
>It seems to be that there is a general cultural stoppage in which even the likes of Donkey Kong .. can be a source of profound excitement and outrage.
Yet you go on to lampshade the actual questions that should be asked? Are you hanging out or is your response limited? Or are you promting us to ask who's manipulating a greater outrage and to what effect?
>>26863 I'm finding it hard to seperate the games design from the marketing - The way you talk about it makes me think they sat around a boardroom and designed the entire thing as a single project rather than creating a cool game then figuring out how to sell it. If that's the case how could anyone trust tripple A studios again?
This is the sort of thing that anti-conspiracy advocates would tell you just happens of itself via multiple seperate moving parts, rather than being planned from top down.
Generally yes, with a caveat. Certain games, including ones using Limited Run Games' Carbon Engine for example, just don't run. Even Nintendo's own Pikmin 3 has a lot of issues, though that's apparently been resolved today. Certain Switch 1 games have received advertised free enhancement patches, like Pokemon Scarlet/Violet. Certain games haven't received advertised free enhancements but see better performance, like Bayonetta 3.
Then there's the paid enhancements which are like DLCs that add content like new modes for Mario Party and Kirby. Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom have paid enhancements (though free with Nintendo Switch Online Expansion Pass membership), that make them run at 60FPS and give you a totally unnecessary ability to interact with the game through the NSO app.
Personally I can live with paid enhancements if they come with substantial content, like Kirby. But paying to get good framerates is quite disgusting.
I agree with you to an extent but I have to say, it often feels like the "just ignore it, you are perpetuating it by giving it attention" argument only ever comes out when the thing in question is on "your side" of the culture war. When it's the other side, they join in the chorus denouncing it just the same.
You know the way you are engaging with this is a thousand times worse that how I was. Like I'm just making observations and picking it apart, you seem genuinely offended. To flip the script in the same bullshit way you are "sounds like you have fallen for the marketing by engaging me ho ho" when your standards for falling for something is making any observation at all about the world around you, you cannot avoid 'engagement' without living inside a windowless room. Your standards are insane and you clearly have more of a chip on your shoulder than I do, something something living in your head rent free.
I imagine if I was genuinely bothered I would either write either to the ASA or my MP. You seem to be advocating for a passiveness in life that seems tragic. Like you've long ago decided that the system is monolithic and unchanging. At every level people in the democratic process want people engaged in the democratic process, your disengament is actually a social disease that will make you unhappy.
>The way you talk about it makes me think they sat around a boardroom and designed the entire thing as a single project rather than creating a cool game then figuring out how to sell it. If that's the case how could anyone trust tripple A studios again
How the sausage is made eh? Games made by Nintendo aren't ever really made because they are cool they are made as part tech demo for the capacity of their new consoles. A lot of games are built off a gimmick and expanded out from that hitting the logical beats. And who you are selling that game to us 100% a consideration of the design process before you've even began coding, there is simply too much money in the line for it not to be a consideration, and you need to be able to unite behind a vision that is articulable. You aren't going to get a Nintendo flagship console selling game that isn't designed to appeal to people with single digit ages.
The decision to use donkey Kong instead of Mario as the flagship game was probably a reductive one - we have the ability to destroy terrain and we want to show that off and make that the game - what character does that fit the best?
>>26873 >we have the ability to destroy terrain and we want to show that off and make that the game - what character does that fit the best?
Could have been Mario, he has it on his CV.
Also Wario could work, he likes gold and smashing stuff. He even had a gold mine in Mario Kart. Out of interest, I just looked up when the last non-WarioWare, Wario game released. Shake Dimension in 2008. Perhaps Nintendo thinks he gets enough exposure from the party games and doesn't need a "proper" game.
>>26873 >You seem to be advocating for a passiveness in life that seems tragic. Like you've long ago decided that the system is monolithic and unchanging
I'm saying that if you're going to engage critically with something, make it something worth engaging with. Not giving a shit about Donkey Kong does not eqaute to checking out of life altogether, quite the contrary.
>The decision to use donkey Kong instead of Mario as the flagship game was probably a reductive one - we have the ability to destroy terrain and we want to show that off and make that the game - what character does that fit the best?
Being more cynical I'd say it's because they are saving the Mario game for a Christmas sales boost, or the Switch 2 Lite they will release next year.
Xenoblade Chronicles X - not enjoying it. The other Xenoblades have good exploration, bad combat, and a good but incredibly convoluted anime-esque story. XCX has good exploration, bad combat, and a very dry story.
Super Mario Bros Wonder - played about four hours of this today. Might be the best 2D platformer I've ever played. Every level feels fresh. Even though superficially it looks like another game in the New Super Mario Bros series, Wonder differentiates itself by not being boring shit.
The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom - surprisingly great. I thought it'd be an okay gimmicky diversion, but I've enjoyed the opening two dungeons and accompanying overworld stuff more than the equivalent content in any other Zelda.
Nintendo fans get slandered a lot, but Nintendo do make a lot of very good games. Even though I look and sound like pic related, at least I'm playing some quality video games.
I have had a long running love affair with Doom I even made that wad none of you played, but I think I am coming to realise that Quake may just be the better game. It doesn't have quite the same wealth of community content, but what there is is near uniformly fucking stellar. Or maybe it's just easier to sort the wheat from the chaff when there's less out there.
I had been putting off playing the new episode Machine Games made with the remaster, but I finally got around to setting up a modern sourceport and everything to play it properly, and it's seriously great stuff. Amazing how this game holds up so well today, and how seriously great one of the earliest proper 3D engines from 1996 can look with skilled mappers and artistry. At points it looks like a low-poly Half Life 2. Which goes to show I suppose, the Source engine still has this engine's DNA somewhere at it's core as far as I understand.
I had played Arcane Dimensions a few years ago and been blown away, but then pretty much forgot about it; so today I've done some research and downloaded about 40 of the "best" maps and campaigns to work through. Most of them are pretty short but it'll keep me going for the weekend I reckon.
Get GZdoom, install it where your normal Doom folder is, then drag and drop the mod file onto the GZdoom executable, and it'll play it instead of vanilla Doom.
Only if you really want to though. You don't have to. But I will feel bad if you don't. But you don't have to. It's up to you. I'm not bothered. No, I'm fine. Stop asking about it. It's fine, really.
The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom has become one of my favourite games ever. I finished it in just under 16 hours. I did a lot of optional stuff, but howlongtobeat has it down as 21 hours for a normal playthrough.
I traded it in to get the Link's Awakening remake. It does feel like a 32 year old game. If I compare the bosses from 2024's Echoes of Wisdom, to 2019's remake of 1993's Link's Awakening, the difference in complexity is staggering. It's by no means a bad thing, but it is weird fighting bosses that have precisely one attack.
It's similar to comparing Dark Souls and Elden Ring. Dark Souls bosses have 4-6 combos that are easily dealt with, while Elden Ring bosses have dozens of bullshit combos with feints that make the game borderline unplayable.
I never really got that complaint with Elden Ring, but then, I was using summons like a scrub. It just seemed to me that if fans expect them to keep making it harder with every iteration for near on a decade and a half, it's going to get daft eventually, and that point was already reached by DS3 in my view.
This is a short, free third person platformer where you play as a cute, little dog stuck in a house without supervision but with one singular mission: get the house as filthy as possible!
Mechanically you do so by first rolling in dirt, shaking elsewhere, and interacting with the environment. The goal is to find some hidden images by spraying dirt on them.
>>26886 Link's Awakening down. I think it had some issues. Eagle Tower is one of the worst Zelda dungeons ever. I was glad to finish it.
>>26887 Dark Souls 2 was my ideal level of difficulty. Main game is challenging but not too much bullshit, and the DLC areas are for extra hard challenges. I think Dark Souls 3 is the upper limit of acceptable difficulty for me. The DLC goes too far.
Obviously many people relish a greater challenge which is why Elden Ring has done so well, I'm just soft as shite.
That's a sentiment I don't get. They're part of the game, the game doesn't hold back so why should the player? If people want to do challange runs, fine, but the baseline is to use summons.
I've picked it up myself, and looking at the other games I've picked out as this summer's steam sale haul, there's something of a theme.
I've been meaning to get WRATH for absolutely yonks. It was one of the very early ones to come along when they started doing all these boomer shooter revival cash ins, but it stands out for using the actual OG Quake engine, and not just low-poly assets in modern Unity or Unreal.
I played the demo and thought it's a bit much. I feel like some of these retro shooters go far more over-the-top than they need to, and besides I am usually more into the dark and moody aesthetic than the neon look (even though I love cyberpunk in general, the genre and the game.)
In that regard Echo Point Nova was a bit of a punt, because it has a couple of things that might not be my cup of tea, but I haven't seen another game have such a near unanimously positive reception like that since Helldivers.
>>26892 >>26893 Well, I played for 50 minutes. While the atmosphere is very interesting both visually and audibly, the variety of concept designs seem to mesh poorly and the writing doesn't inspire.
Within the tutorial section you meet servitor like floating skull mechanations and a torture chamber encased creature that tells you how agony sharpens their reason while profusely bleeding chunks of bodily matter. Then there's a whole host of mystical mushrooms, etheral flying dragons and a pirate woman who flies off on a wooden ship. It's .. unusual.
I'm not particularly enthused to play again but I'll give it another go in the week. I'm hoping I can detatch myself of expectations and simply play the game as it is.
There's also this weird toggleable 'shaking pixels' option that joggles elements around - I can remember something like this from my earlier years but this recreation is way too much.
>There's also this weird toggleable 'shaking pixels' option that joggles elements around - I can remember something like this from my earlier years but this recreation is way too much.
It's seemingly part of the current nostalgia wave. When I was a late teen to early 20s-lad, retro 16bit pixel games were all the rage, because that was the nostalgia thing. The kind of games I am only just barely old enough to remember playing (I think the very first videogame I ever played was Lion King on Windows 95), but can't really had a claim to have been part of that generation. Likewise the kids these days remember PS1 era graphics the same way, so a lot of these retro games nowadays exaggerate the style. It's how they remember it, not how it actually was.
Can't really fault them for it I suppose, but it's going to get weird in another 5-10 years when it's the PS2/Dreamcast era's turn.
It's as multiplayer as you want, you can solo it, play it with mates, or random it and usually be welcome. You are one of four classes, all of which are useful if you know how to play them.
Scout: take out far enemies, mine the things out of reach
Digger: Commit war crimes and make a path to the Morkite
Gunner: Pew Pew, and make this passable
Engineer: Make platforms, place turrets
You choose your own archetype, and then choose if you want to solo, friends only. or drop into an open game.
Even playing solo is fun, drinking a Leaf Lover and trying a few of the stronger brews. It's as solo or friendly as you want it to be. And all bullshit is in game earned, once bought no nothing.
To reignite the Donkey Kong conversation, I played three hours of Bananza yesterday, and will play more today.
It's Mario Odyssey 2. Pretty much identical in structure, only the levels are a bit more complex, and the gimmick is voxel terrain deformation instead of object and NPC possession. It's really good and fun. It just seems like they started work on an Odyssey 2 where you travel to the Earth's core instead of across its countries, and just rebadged it with Donkey Kong. If you like Mario Odyssey you'll probably like this. Doesn't feel very Donkey Kong though. Still very very fun. I think they tried to make this monkey look seductive but she looks like the cartoon version of Egon Spengler.
I'm trying to refund FutaDomWorld. I wanted an erotic femdom based game, but all the femdom games on Steam look garbage. FutaDomWorld has futa femdom, and the reviews say it's genuinely well written so I tried it.
The central premise is that futas started appearing on Earth, swallowing their cum too much binds you to that specific futa, and once bound you and all your assets are their property. So you have to find a suitable futa to bind yourself to, by levelling up stats, and not getting raped into being bound to a
ne'er-do-well futa. If your mental stat goes below 0 it ends I think. Being raped reduces your mental stats more than consensual sex.
I think it would be better if it was the same premise but without futas. Like being bound to a vagina having woman from her bodily fluids. The huge cocks really prevent me from immersing myself in the world.
It's been in early access for over 10 years, and they seem to be constantly adding to it. So I imagine it gets really deep in terms of narratives about being mindcontrolled by futa semen.
I found my 20 hours of Donkey Kong Bananza a more compelling gameplay experience, but my 18 minutes of FutaDomWorld really opened my eyes to just what a futa based game can be.
The thing I can't get into about anything futa/herm/genderbendy in general is that it's trying to have the best of both worlds, it's trying to have its cake and eat it, it's trying to run on both tracks; but ultimately that squanders the vast majority of appeal most kinks had in the first place.
A huge number of fetishes have some kind of basis in the gender dynamic between male and female, and you spoil that if you want to have a character that's both male and female. That dynamic can no longer be there. A futa character in any sexual fetish dynamic is just a sexual Mary Sue with all the strengths and none of the weaknesses of both genders. There's no tension, there's no foil.
I've stopped accepting invitations to typefuck from purple names.
>>26906 In FutaDomWorld the futas are like IRL men, and the men are like IRL women. Men are passed around like toys, or treated as trophies. There are misandrist attitudes where a futa says something like "hey babe fancy a seat on my cock" to the male player character, like how IRL misogynist men would say that to a woman. There's also an element of chivalry in the FutaDomWorld - some futas will come to the defence of a weak man.
Maybe I'll cancel the refund, it could actually be a brilliant piece of fisherperson art.
Though again, if it was a game set in a matriarchy of actual women, and had similar themes, it would be better as there'd be less anal rape involved.
I would recommend Lies of P. It is like Bloodborne, but instead of it being werewolves and cosmic horrors, it's mechanical puppets and plague mutants and also you're Pinocchio. It has all the mechanics one would expect from a FromSoft game, an almost shameless apeing of their games, but is done so well I find it better than Bloodborne.
One key thing is it added difficulty options recently. So at the start there's Original, Easy, and Easier. I'm playing on Easy, and the game still sometimes frustrates and challenges.
This guy is like a cross between Dark Souls' Stray Demon, and Dark Souls 3's Saint of the Deep Devouring. Incredibly unoriginal, but presented in such a cool and fun way that you can forgive that.
It is still the most positive co-op game without a clique to play with, no matter what Haz.2 or more and you get some call outs based on classs, But it's all in good fun.
1k sscout, shout for light while I get Nitra and you can throw youir own flare.
>>26921 Look at these dudes. I cant take Dwarf people seriously, but I love dwarf concepts and themes. What're they like, engineering, geologist metalheads? I bet they don't travel to the 'con in their gear.
The Light Brigade is a VR game that I was eyeing up a year or so back, when I first got my headset, but ended up getting sucked into my 3 month long odyssey of Skyrim VR instead; but it's one I really should have tried earlier on.
It's got a very interesting aesthetic, where it's sort of like if you mashed PS1 Medal of Honour with a bit of a christianity themed Dark Souls flavour. You know, you're somehow in some kind of WW2 heavily christian themed purgatory or something and bla bla bla souls souls souls you know the drill; but it feels very sombre and atmospheric. And for some reason I really love stylised low-fi graphics in VR. It somehow always feels much more authentic than any game which strives for realism. The game is hard, but just the right kind of hard- You feel like you are up against steep odds but like a real soldier would, desperately covering and blind firing and chucking grenades around corners. The weapons are realistic, and that's part of the difficulty, but it's not your boring selection of typical modern military. It's those nerdy ones like the Gewehr 43 or M3 or C96 Type-14 you only know because you spent so much time watching WW2 documentaries. You have to know your clipper strips from your magazines, but it's all in service of the immersion, not just gun nut boner polishing.
The problem with VR is that it's hard to find games that really satisfy once you've played the really big hitters like Alyx and Skyrim and... Alyx, and Skyrim. It's one of those things where you look through the titles available, and a lot of the good ones have their potential spoiled, because they all follow some daft market trend that's just inexplicable but they all follow because it's what the dumbfuck 12 year olds on Quest store are buying. So you'll end up with a handful of simple but well executed games, and play those over and over. For me, that's Compound, Pistol Whip, Iron Rebellion, Alyx, Skyrim, and now I am pretty sure, this will be one of them.
(Until You Fall gets an honourable mention because it's really very good at what it does, but it relies far, far too much on that roguelike "you WILL die a lot" thing, and it's ultimately very short- You will just take forever to get the lucky run where you finish.)
(I played about an hour of Wrath: Aeon of Ruin and that's nice. Good solid game by the looks. I'll need to wait for my mood to come around to it though.)
