FUSER should be called Ruin A Song With Smash Mouth’s “All Star” Simulator 2020
Games Features What Are You Playing This Weekend?
Every Friday, A.V. Club staffers kick off our weekly open thread for the discussion of gaming plans and recent gaming glories, but of course, the real action is down in the comments, where we invite you to answer our eternal question: What Are You Playing This Weekend?
One of the problems with trying to review this month’s massive console launches—besides the whole “highly contested national election during a pandemic” thing, natch—it’s that it’s suddenly become a damn fine season for games regardless of whether you’re shelling out for an Xbox Series X or PS5. (Something that Sam Barsanti and I hit on as both a positive and a negative in our Roundtable this week about the state of both systems’ launch libraries.) It can be difficult to really dig into, say, PlayStation 5 exclusive Godfall (very shiny, very weird) when all your hindbrain actually wants to do is screw around with the business sim minigame in Yakuza: Like A Dragon, or figure out how good you can make the melody to Dolly Parton’s immortal “Jolene” sound when it’s forced to play in support of Steve Harwell belting a hearty “Some-BODY” into the ether of Harmonix’s compulsive new DJ game FUSER.
The premise of FUSER will be familiar to anyone who spent any time with the Guitar Hero creator’s last big swing at digital mixing, DropMix: Hand the player a huge stack of popular songs from dozens of artists, genres, albums, and eras; separate each one into four parts—roughly tracking to drums, bass, lead melody, and vocals—and allow the player to chop, screw, and otherwise gloriously ruin them to their heart’s content. FUSER loses DropMix’s whole “build a song in a physical space with collectible cards” conceit—and adds in some not always successful score-keeping elements to “game” the whole thing up—but the core is still completely recognizable. Here’s a bunch of pieces of a bunch of music: Do with it what you will.
What I mostly do with it is find the single best way to ruin any number of great songs—Childish Gambino’s “Summertime Magic,” Blue Oyster Cult’s “Don’t Fear The Reaper,” Tone-Loc’s “Funky Cold Medina,” dozens of others—by bending them into service of the lyrics to Smash Mouth’s “All Star,” because I’m nothing if not the idiot child that the internet has raised me to be. The truly hideous thing about FUSER, though, is that Harmonix is so good at mixing and layering music at this point that even the national anthem of Shrekheads everywhere ends up sounding pretty goddamn good in the mix with only a minimal amount of work. And when I do dare to actually move outside my own extremely basic musical tastes, the game constantly rewards me with exciting new combinations and sounds. FUSER is a shockingly good comedy game, if you’ve got a perverse enough sense of taste, but stumbling onto something that sounds absolutely, against-all-odds amazing is a fantastic feeling that it generates nearly constantly. Harmonix got big by creating games that trick our brains into thinking we might genuinely be good at making music, and FUSER is the best expression of that delightful shell game since the studio first added fake drumming that’s also essentially real drumming into the mix with Rock Band.
And yeah, the gaming elements of FUSER aren’t always great; the “Campaign” mode is essentially one very long tutorial, steadily layering in new tools, allowing you to (hypothetically) begin making musical leaps a bit more advanced than “Pretty much anything sounds good if you put the strings from ‘Call Me Maybe’ behind it.” (For real, though: absolute secret weapon shit.) And the score-keeping can feel arbitrary and a little punishing—although it’s easy to turn off. If FUSER doesn’t always make a terribly compelling argument for itself as a game, though, it’s still incredibly addictive as both a toy and a tool, luring you into its hypnotic flow while simultaneously teaching you a whole new way to think about music you love. (Or were completely unfamiliar with until now). (Or was “All Star,” by Smash Mouth.) It might seem like hubris to launch a distinctly old-gen game like this during the week of two of the most aggressively marketed console launches of all time, but FUSER wins the war for our hearts, minds, and attentions, hands-down. After all, only shooting stars break the mold.
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I am playing a little known indie title called “Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla”. I’ve played nearly all of the Assassin’s Creed’s titles dating back to the original, and I think they’ve finally nailed the alchemy of “keeping good from the old, adding something new that’s also good, and dropping the bads”. Basically every little irritation I had from Odyssey — like attracting a “wanted” rating, being completely unable to silent assassinate a third of the soldiers I need to kill, having any hint of detection result in an alarm going off that sends a parade of 200 guys at me, and needing to spend 2 minutes before every fort attack swirling around in the sky with my eagle spotting stuff. The equipment progression is also a million times less tedious than in the last game, dropping the levelled gear that needs to be constantly replaced or expensively levelled up (an annoyance with The Division, too). It’s like the game was focus-grouped exclusively for me. The skill progression is… kinda odd, not necessarily an improvement, but I don’t hate it. And it’s a little bit buggy, but not in any way game breaking. The core movement/parkour mechanics have been refined and mastered over 20 years, with little mechanical evolutions (like tree branch movement, indoor traversal, separate left- and right-hand equipables) contributed by every entry in the franchise. There’s some tweaks to the combat mechanics vs. Odyssey that I absolutely love. Can’t get enough of this game.
This sounds really promising! I finished Odyssey a few months ago after enjoying it a lot and this sounds like my next big game to play.
I’m looking forward to Valhalla, but I’m still slowly working my way through the older games first, so I’m still playing as Ezio back in his pope-punching days (AKA Assassin’s Creed 2) so I have roughly ten games to go before I can be a viking.
Maybe I’m doing it wrong, but are melee counters back? I play basically every other AC game because I do a few too many tasks to be healthy and then I need to step away for a year or two, so the last one for me was Origins. I’m fine more or less with the changes–though inventories could be shorter–but I do miss stringing together a few counters in a row.
I remember AC… 3 (I think?) there was the counter-system where a well timed push of a button directly executed a devastating counter, and you could be swarmed by attackers, and just pressing the counter button at the right moment would lead to stringing together devastating counters. That was fun, though a bit repetitive, and maybe easier than it should have been. It was more rewarding to counter an attack than to initiate one, so a lot of fights were basically a game of chicken, waiting for enemy to swing first.The last couple AC entries have had very muted counters, and one of the tweaks to the mechanics in this one is to make countering more powerful. But it’s not a direct one button thing like it was back in AC 3, it’s more nuanced than that. First of all, there are power up attacks (the attackers glow red when charging up for them) that can’t be blocked at all, only dodged—so you have to be on your toes. Second, when you time your block just as the blow is landing, it doesn’t automatically execute a counter. Rather, it depletes a secondary health bar on the attacker (their block/shield capability, as I understand it), and has a chance of initiating a “stun”. If the enemy is stunned, you get a click-R3 prompt, and clicking it is basically a Mortal Kombat finisher move, guaranteed kill. Very satisfying, and the animations are extremely varied (some involve turning the enemy’s weapon against them). There is also an upside to this system, which is that if you time your block too *early*, there’s no penalty for missing the counter. You just block the attack normally, which still creates a bit of a window for a counter attack. I’m not sure how intuitive I’ve made that sound, but for me it plays really comfortably and feels well balanced—challenging enough to be satisfying when you get it right, but not so difficult that it’s frustrating. Another thing I like about the combat mechanics, is that the enemies don’t counter YOU (at least not that I’ve seen so far). I remember that being a balancing mechanic in previous entries, that stronger enemies would counter half your attacks, and there was basically nothing you could do about it. That’s no longer a thing, fights with tougher enemies involve using heavy attacks when the enemy has their shield up, and unleashing light attacks after dodging a heavy attacks or blocking/countering a light attack. With some bow play sprinkled when there’s enough distance from the enemy. This is not a paid promotion, I swear, I’m just having a lot of fun with the game this week.
I much appreciate this reply—I might not just have the nuances of all the combat changes and evolution yet. I didn’t play AC3, so I think I experienced it in Black Flag or Syndicate. In Syndicate in particular I liked stringing the fight finishers and how they had some variety between the weapon types and the number of opponents on the edge of defeat. You’re right, it definitely could get spammy with the single button doing so much, satisfying as it was for me. I’ve never gotten the timing quite right with my blocks in Origins, so because I’m a terrible blocker I’ve gotten into a different loop where I’ve relied too much on spears to clear the way, and the heavy attack to knock down a big foe. I’d like a medium more forgiving counter so I can add so variety to my own play!But in general I like a lot of developments, and not mechanically I like the way they’ve handled the little stories, at least in Origins. You complete something you don’t necessarily have to return anywhere to report it, but if you run into someone from said side mission they’ll comment on it, and it’s made the world a bit more lived in, which I like.
Board GamesAfter playing it for the last time this week, we decided to sell Raiders of the North Sea. When I don’t really enjoy playing a game despite winning every single time, that’s not a good sign. Gameplay-wise it’s a solid game but it just feel too repetitive for me I guess. We also got rid of Fresco and are in the process of selling Catan (3 boxes and a wooden chest). Always nice to clean up your gaming collection and make room for new ones.Video GamesI finished Spiritfarer. I was a really great experience, but sadly became a little tedious in the end. It didn’t help that only the unlikable characters were left on my boat at a certain point. I’m working on Paradise Killer right now. A very unique game that really makes me feel like a detective(sorry, Investigator(!)). My only problem is that I can only play it for short amounts of time because it gives me really bad motion sickness… I don’t really understand how this possible issue wasn’t discovered in the development process since apparently I’m not the only one with this predicament. Guess I won’t try to collect every blood gem and collectible then.
I’ve been playing a bit of Jenny LeClue: Detectivu (yes, that’s the title, no, I don’t know why it’s called that) on the Switch. It’s a charming adventure about a Nancy Drew-esque young girl detective who suddenly finds herself having to solve a murder case, and this plays alongside the author of the LeClue books having to commit to write something darker and more dangerous if he wants the series to continue. The writing’s really fun, the art’s cute, it’s a fun time despite some glitches. Also, I have solved the final puzzle in Mario Super Picross. That last one (in a hidden “Ultra” mode) is a reaaaaaaal doozy, requiring a lot of guesswork. Now to find more Picross games.Making some good progress on Hades, too.
no, I don’t know why it’s called thatIt’s called that because it rhymesLike all good videogymes
I’m seeing all this hype for the new consoles, and part of me wants to be into it, especially since games like Fuser legitimately sound like things I’d like to play around with, but with how little I’ve actually sat down to play my Switch (in spite of having a handful of games I genuinely love that I’ve yet to finish and several new releases I really want to play), I’ll probably be waiting at least a year. Maybe that’ll change if I take on a roommate and keep the same ridiculously lean COVID lifestyle budget, but for right now, what’s stopping me is, “Hey IK, remember how excited you were for Cadence of Hyrule? How’s that playthrough going, huh? And how about that new PC you were gonna be able to play Persona 4 Golden on? How’s that playthrough going, huuuuuuuh?”I really am fascinated by all the news, excited to watch people playing on Twitch (until they get DMCA’d, because Twitch is a weird place to be right now), but I’ll probably be joining this generation of games a couple years late. Fuser’s one of the game that still beckons to me, though.For now, I’ve had yet another week where I largely just played One Deck Dungeon. The novelty’s about to wear off, though, since I’ve even purchased the brand new DLC and finished every challenge/achievement available, with the exception of maxing out every character’s campaign mode XP. I mean, just got the last non-grindy achievement like 20 minutes ago as I’m typing this, and I’ll probably be doing those slowly, since I truly do love the gameplay loop and want to see how other characters’ abilities change the feel of the game, but the search for a new obsession begins tomorrow.And it’s been a pretty terrible week at work – we went from being short 1 person to being short 4 people, so I’ve had to be our office’s de facto manager while doing my job – so I’m probably going to be dipping into one of the games in my emergency stash for when I need a guaranteed delicious experience. The final Shovel Knight campaign, King of Cards? On the table. Hollow Knight? Valdis Story: Abyssal City? Gosh, a metroidvania is just what the doctor ordered. Hell, I might even try to lose myself in something timesinky and sandboxy like Stardew Valley, Slime Rancher, or My Time at Portia, look up after two hours of farming Friday night to realize my Monday alarm is going off and I haven’t so much as blinked, let alone slept.It’s gonna be a good weekend. Not sure what flavor of good, but I certainly have a lot of options.
Hype is overrated. It’s not like the new consoles will disappear when the launch window’s over.
I’ll also be waiting a couple of years before joining the current console generation. I mean, I currently don’t even have a Switch and that’s one I definitely want to get…
Though the upgraded PC is happening first.
Definitely need to grab Fuser at some point. I loved Dropmix, but having cards was a bit hard to deal with. This weekend I’ll be fully jumping into the new Call of Duty Black Ops. These games are basically my yearly sports game now that I stopped buying Madden and NHL every year. I played the Beta a few weeks ago and mostly liked it. Looking forward to jumping into the campaign.I also attempted to get a PS5 online from Walmart yesterday. I tried all 4 times they were available but no luck. They really should have used a captcha or something to curb the bots.
This weekend is for “finishing” Crash 4. “Finish” in quotes because simply surviving every level is a minority of the myriad goals, which include
– Completing levels with three deaths or fewer
– Collecting hidden gems
– Destroying every crate
– Destroying every crate without dying for a “perfect” relic
– Time trials
– Mirrored versions of the levels, with all of the above objectives
– Collecting video tapes, which disappear if you dieThis wouldn’t be so daunting were the levels not longer and more gruelling than those of the original trilogy – or at least, they feel that way. I doubt I’ll be 100%-ing this one, at least not without a break.
I’m finishing up Dragon’s Dogma (Switch) and then onto Hades. There’s also a chance I’ll be playing some Jettomero and replaying more Donut County since my 2 year old loves trying to play them. It’s funny because while I got Jettomero pretty cheap a while back, I did not enjoy what I played but my son loves the giant robot and the game is pretty simple so it worked out.
I haven’t played a whole lot of games this past week. Of course, that does mean I I hit up my gaming comfort food – Star Wars: The Old Republic. I’m on my Jedi Knight playthrough still.
I’m at the point where the Sith Emperor is trying to perform a dark ritual to absorb all life in the galaxy. The test run is on the prison planet of Belsavis. I’ve been getting ready to confront an Imperial commander who looks like this: Pretty sure she’s clearly an evil zealot. Which is why she received a lightsaber enema. Her lover (the Krannus mentioned in the screenshot) is apparently a Sith pureblood and the key to stopping the ritual on the planet, so I’m going around disabling ray shield generators so that I can confront Imperials near a main reactor.
Also, after taking a break a couple of Tuesdays ago for election season, our Dungeons & Dragons Rise of the Frostmaiden campaign resumed this past Tuesday. Since we’d achieved a big milestone last game session and the party had all leveled up to level 3, this was more of a downtime session. Our party consists of my variant human Path of the Storm Herald (Tundra) Barbarian, my wife’s Half-Elf Oath of Devotion Paladin, a Gnome Illusionist wizard and a Half-Elf Beast Master Ranger.
After tracking down and dealing with a supernatural serial killer and a tiger shaman last time out, we had returned to the town of Bryn Shander to shop and recuperate. I’d finally bought scale armor, a shield and a war hammer for my previously unarmored, maul-wielding barbarian.
Whilst in town, we discovered a plan by a sinister dude, Arnold Beitz, who may or may not be part of a conspiracy to undermine the validity of the Ten Towns speaker’s council by bringing in illicit supplies. He had a bison-towed wagon full of supplies that he was attempting to toss to the townsfolk in the square in an attempt to incite a riot.
Our party attempted to defuse the situation, firstly with oratory and pleading the case for rationing through the long winter, which only kind of worked until Beitz escalated to pushing and shoving. At that point twin fog clouds were cast over the supply wagon, our Paladin cast sanctuary on the young town speaker, Duvessa Shane: Our ranger attempted some crowd control by trying to target Beitz’s instigators and discretely knock them out. The wizard did a little bit of magical mind-reading to discover that Beitz is working with the Sunblight Duergar tribe, which would discredit him immensely if we were able to provide non-magical proof.
My barbarian, in the meantime, attempted to cartjack the supply wagon in order to drive it away from the townsfolk and help becalm the crowd. What followed was a roll of a Natural 1 in animal handling and thus driving the fog-clouded cart and its two huge bison beasts of burden through the crowd of people in the square and crushing several. This didn’t have a calming effect on the crowd and a minor riot ensued. Thanks to several unarmed strikes, me being hidden by fog and the paladin doing a whole lot of lay on hands among the towns folk, and the ranger getting the bison under control and out of the way, we were able to stop things and de-escalate.
To the point that we were invited to join the speaker for dinner and given a mission to investigate why the supply of knucklehead trout was drying up. That lead us to Mammoth Falls, a tower occupied by this slightly batty artificier: Who has ties to our Paladin’s backstory and has given us a quest to recover a stolen prism that would help his trout stocking efforts. Apparently the thief might be a hag that killed our Paladin’s human grandmother many years ago…
Also, Google Stadia was offering a free one month trial to YouTube Premium members, and since I am one of those, I ordered that purely because it’s a free Chromecast Ultra and white Stadia Pro Control. I don’t know if I’m even going to play any of the Stadia games before canceling the free membership. Apparently the controller can be used with non-Stadia Steam games, so that’s something.
Also, my slowly assembling piecemeal PC has the first component has arrived, the Corsair Carbide 110R case. The 4 120mm case fans are also in the mail.
Since we needed to reprioritize a wheelchair ramp for lost_wifey first in our budget before I start getting components to fill the case up. Since the GPUs are still basically impossible to find, I’m hoping to go with the PSU and motherboard next. I also checked and the motherboard is compatible with the Zen 3 Ryzen series, which will give me some future compatibility, at least…
Backlogged: Industrial Sabotage Edition So, at the end of last week’s post I said I would be playing Super Ghouls ‘n Ghosts next, and true to my word, I started it the very next day. And then, after about half an hour, I stopped.Lately, I’ve been thinking more and more about the pop culture I consume. I’m a completionist to my core, so if I start reading/watching/playing something, I’m usually determined to finish it. But it goes beyond that, too. I keep massive lists of media to consume; books, movies, TV shows, podcasts, games. I know in my heart that I’ll never get through any of these lists, not at their current lengths, but I can rarely bring myself to cut anything from them. I feel like I have pop culture FOMO; a fear that the shows or games that don’t make the cut will turn out to be underrated gems, and by passing them by, I’m losing something precious. I know it’s irrational, but it’s still something I struggle to navigate at times.My retro gaming list currently has 186 franchises on it. Not games, franchises. I’ve been working through it chronologically, and with each year (and the birth of each new console, genre, etc) the number of games that I plan to play goes up; six games in 1989, 12 in 1990. I started my first 1991 game (Sonic the Hedgehog) on the 5th of December last year, and yesterday I finished the twenty-first and final game I’d chosen to represent the year (more on that in a minute). Ideally, I’d be gradually catching up to the present, but at this rate I’m struggling just to keep up with the passage of time, and the lists are only getting longer; 24 games for 1992, recently cut down from 28. Something needs to give.
All of this is my way of processing (and justifying) the fact that I quit Super Ghouls ‘n Ghosts after 30 minutes. The difficulty felt unfair, the platforming was clunky, enemies spawn right on top of you (plus the game starts chugging when more than a couple appear on screen at a time), and power-ups make no sense (why would you let me upgrade my armour twice if one hit still leaves me running around in my boxers?!). I’m sure the game has its fans, who are probably shaking theirs lances at me right now, but I’m not one of them. I quit, and I’m counting it as a victory, at least of a personal kind.The flipside to all that soul-searching, and one of the reasons why I’m still happily marching on with this ridiculous, almost-certainly-doomed experiment, is pretty simple: my twenty-first and final game for 1991 was Sid Meier’s Civilization, and it fucking rocked.I’m not going to go into depth on this one. My lone playthrough only scratched the surface of what the game has to offer, and I’m sure its sequels have added layer upon layer of strategy in the years since, so I doubt I’d find anything that hasn’t been said. The graphics are rudimentary. The sound is sparing. There is so much to learn, and no easy way to learn it besides blundering ahead and trying not to repeat your mistakes. The menus aren’t quite up to the task of managing a late-game empire, and the accompanying armies are unwieldy, chaotic beasts. Watching my patiently assembled invasion forces dash themselves against the stubborn walls of enemy cities, damned by the hidden mathematics unfolding behind the scenes, made me want to tear out my hair.
None of that matters. When I wasn’t playing, I was thinking about my wars with the English, the Mongolians and the Zulus. When I was asleep, I dreamed of sailboats and frigates charting pixelated seas. And after 5,906 years (or five days, depending on your perspective), Lord Trajan, immortal ruler of the Roman Empire, looked out over the world he had conquered and thought, ‘Yeah, okay, I can see why people are obsessed with Civ.’Anyway, that’s it from me this week, and with 1991 in the rear-view mirror, I’ll probably be taking a break from retro gaming for a little while. I was going to do a mini-retrospective on the year, but this is running over time as it is, so I’ll stick with a simple top 5 (in alphabetical order to save me the trouble of ranking them):1. Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge2. Shining in the Darkness3. Sid Meier’s Civilization4. SimCity5. Super Castlevania IV When I do return return to my retro list, I’ll probably go back and play an older cRPG before I move on to 1992, so in the spirit of my renewed dedication to list-cutting, I also have a question for anyone who made it this far. Out of the following three, which is the least essential: Ultima IV, The Bard’s Tale, or Might and Magic?Thanks for reading (boy, this was a long one!), and as always, see you folks next time!
Super Ghosts ‘n’ Ghouls is a fascinating game to watch a speed run of, because even the guys who are really good tend to get walled by unfair enemy spawns and patterns that are impossible react to in time, yet even as they die half a dozen times or more on a single checkpoint, having played any of the games in the series informs you of how much practice and skill go into just dying half a dozen times on a checkpoint.It’s a brutal game. I never found it satisfying to actually play. Giving up after 30 minutes of SGnG is the SGnG experience. I approve. That’s a big checkmark on reliving the games of 1991.
Thank you, I feel very validated right now. And I might have to give a speedrun a look.
If you want my recommendation, check out NMETV, who ran the game at AGDQ 2019. He tends to keep some pretty entertaining commentary/chat banter up while he runs games, and he’s a buddy of mine.
Thanks for the recommendation. It was interesting (and gratifying) to see that even with a precise knowledge of chest and enemy placements, there were still moments where they were at the mercy of RNG.
Yeah, it’s funny watching someone die so much in a game and still being able to say, “Wow, this guy’s good!”
I’m still playing The Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt*, because it’s no small game, especially if you have a compulsion to explore all the nooks and crannies, which are usually just crammed with monsters, treasure, or bandits (…but the true quest was the friends we made along the way!). And it just got a little longer, now that I’ve decided to dive into the DLC proper expansions before tackling the final vanilla game mission.I’ve just finished Hearts of Stone and it has been quite a ride. I’m going to try to be vague in this paragraph, so as to not spoil anything, but It almost feels like their goal with this expansion was not just to add more “content”**, but rather to experiment with the fundamental assumptions about the series by ask some “What If”s: What if Geralt had to make a deal with the devil?, What if Geralt was a gregarious roustabout instead of a grumpy, sarcastic fantasy Batman? What if he applied his talents to pulling off a heist? I went for the most difficult ending (I think it’s canon as the “good ending”, but that’s debatable) because the writers are really good at building sympathy for awful people.I haven’t really done many of the treasure hunts or that really expensive enchanting quest line. With the former, I grew discouraged after I found several of the treasure hunts bugged out in the PS4 port that I’m playing. With the latter, I did experiment with on an alternate save file, but as tempting as some of the ultimate boons granted (heavy armor that acts as light armor would really work with my build!), it seems like a NG+ venture, so I passed on it for now.I’ve just dipped my toe into Blood and Wine, so I can’t really make a definitive statement on it. So far, it’s pretty intriguing—jumping into the high fantasy of knights and chivalric codes as a contrast to the dark fantasy of the base game—though I would be rash to assume this is the arc of the entire expansion (it wouldn’t be the first time a quest-line has gone in a direction I didn’t anticipate).*Alt title: The Witcher 3: We know you have to stop the literal apocalypse, but could you please solve all our other problems if it’s not *too* inconvenient?!?** “Content” is one of those generic terms—the linguistic equivalent of a flavorless, odorless nutrient paste—that is absolutely unhelpful as a selling point. Is “content” a thoughtful well-written narrative-focused questline or is it one of many rubber-stamped collect-a-thon or another wave of generic enemies? The Witcher 3 has its fair share of the latter, but, thankfully, it favors the former.
Last night, I cracked the seal and welcomed the Playstation (5th Ed.) into my home entertainment system, so that I could play the exact same games that I was playing on the 4th Edition. Overwatch doesn’t look any better or worse for wear, though I need to change the default rumble settings, lest I gradually lose all feeling in my hands to its constant rumble (rumbling when Mercy’s beam is on….maybe not the best choice?). I never got around to playing Avengers on the PS4, so I can’t really tell if my hour playing on the PS5 was an improved experience or not; in my defense, I bought the game this weekend when Target had it on sale for half-price.The biggest surprise to me was the free-to-play game that has siphoned a respectable amount of my time since it launched. For a game that claims a PS5 upgrade is still on the way, Genshin Impact is markedly better on the PS5 than the PS4. The frame-rate is noticeably smoother, visual effects (like tall grass in the wind, or the mist/fog effect at ley lines) are cleaner, and the draw distance seems better than it used to be. For a game primarily platformed on PC & phones, it should not come as a surprise that scalability of the experience is part of the offering…but actually seeing it spelled out to this extent was a surprise. (I’m also happy to say, after the 1.1 patch, I pulled my first 5* character in the game. Running Childe, Barbara, Fischl & Xiangling as my main party, if anyone is on the f2p train with me. Now if only I could find a bow that I like using with him…)
Ended up getting all the Destiny 2 expansions through Game Pass. So that’s what I’m playing. Beyond Light’s dropped so I’m working my way through the legacy story missions. Forgot how satisfying it is.
Oh man, this sounds amazing. I somehow hadn’t heard anything about the new Harmonix game, so that’s an awesome surprise. (yeah, I’m that guy who still owns plastic instruments… and even still uses them!)
This weekend should hopefully be a return to normalcy of sorts. This isn’t some grand statement about post-election life, it’s about my Internet. I’m lucky enough to have a choice in providers and have one that isn’t one of the big two assholes, and I get a solid 100/100 connection with no data caps. At some point they might go 1 gig, but for now, hey, it works. Well it’s been more than a day of it not working. Again, nothing but great functioning and service out of them, but these things happen. They’ve got a tech who will come out to fix it eventually. This is a long ramp up to say I really appreciate that Steam at least has an offline mode, but I am terrified of the idea of our All Digital Games future in the case of an Internet outage. Two nights ago I noticed Tetris Effect was available on Gamepass. I don’t own a PS4 so I hadn’t tried it out yet and it is fantastic. Even without VR, just put on a pair of headphones, it’s amazing. So amazing that I was looking forward to playing it last night and fired it up on my computer after a long day of playing “find Internet for Work From Home stuff.” I open it up and big ol nasty error saying I wasn’t connected to the Internet and I’m probably the devil for trying to run a game without the blessing of a connection. It was a long jumbled error message, but I’m sure that’s what it said. But hey, it’s still 2020. I still have an Xbox One S in the living room and when I downloaded Tetris Effect on my PC, I launched into the Gamepass app on my phone and told it to download to my Xbox too. Surely with the multitude of hours between doing that and when the Internet went out, it downloaded and I could instead play it on my 4K TV (sure it doesn’t output 4K, but whatever). Yep, not a sign of a download. Back around Halloween I had noticed for some reason the console hadn’t run updates on games in forever so I had it chugging for about a day or two running updates and downloading games I thought it had already downloaded. So no Tetris. But the kicker came when instead of watching a Blu-Ray (yeah no Internet means Netflix and Hulu are no-gos), we popped in a DVD. For some reason, this console that is capable of even reading 360 games was like “the fuck is this shit?” and just held on a black screen. The only options were to check the store or anything else for an update. Which is hard to do with no Internet connection. So fingers crossed the tech comes out tomorrow, says “well we need to replace this antique with a brand new hookup that accepts gigabit connections and we’re cutting the price in half” and everything is fixed. Though I’ll just settle for everything being fixed.
Will I say it ? I will say it.Paradox’s Battletech is brilliant.I’m playing the core game (lucky enough to not have any interest in the DLCs) and I’m having a blast. It’s thrilling, gripping, and both suspenseful and soothing. The mechs feel satisfactorily heavy, the hits feel brutal, the difficulty level is very manageable, the balance between tactics and spectacle is great and I love these increasingly cinematographic tactical games that tickle your rain and yet provide the visceral thrills of action movies. The complexity of mech design and mech battling, with heat and range management, is very satisfactory without being overwhelming at all, the rewards management is a nice touch, the quiet space opera transitions give, with almost nothing, a nice sense of scale and the feel of an autonomous surrounding universe. And the mercenary party affiliations is almost very good (only flaw is that you can easily cut off any way to regain the respect of a given party, which is weird for a known mercenary, and very annoying if it closes off the whole galaxy’s black market). Also, as many modern videogames, some insignificant little touches make it unbearably oh-so-progressive in the eyes of gamergaters, which is always a welcome bonus (“oh no it features female characters, oh no you can select the pronouns, my hobby is ruined forever”).Feel is the most important thing. Just like futuristic submarine shooters can fail to render any sense of viscosity and end up like flight simulators in blue-ish fogs (Aquanox will never manage to be Subwar2050), giant mechs, be in in FPS or RTS games, can feel like little soldiers in a miniature world of bush-height trees and cardboard buildings. Especially in Battletech where, to my horror, giant bipedal machines run and jump. But this is nicely averted with the heat management, the screen shaking at every step, and whatever sound or camerawork effect that send the right signal.So. all the right boxes are unexpectedly ticked. Battletech will remain my current gaming obsession for quite a while.
First off: Never sleep on Call Me Maybe’s strings/melody. Source: PomDeter’s mashup “Call Me a Hole”; Head Like a Hole × Call Me Maybe. It is a beautiful bastard. Previously I was playing Hades non-stop. I might not be playing it anymore, but I can’t recommend it highly enough. It was the most fun I’ve had with a game since I first played Borderlands 2 with a friend. On top of that, the level of depth with the dialog interactions is astounding. Supergiant deserves every award it gets nominated for that game.The current game in my pocket is Labyrinth of Legendary Loot. It is a little indie true Roguelike you can get on itch.io. It’s the first Roguelike I actually enjoyed playing for longer periods of time. Enter the Gungeon was fun, but there was a level of Git Gud that I couldn’t quite wrap my head around and it kinda turned me back to the Roguelites that I could feel more accomplished with. The combat is turned based, positioning is important, you can have up to 7 pieces of equipment (weapon, glove, helm, armor, boot, ring, amulet), and the unique abilities for each equipment is fun to play around with and find my niche for that run. Yeah yeah I know that’s a Roguelike staple but it’s delivered to me in a small indie dev package and is accessible to all.