Xbob42

I'm mostly talking about Portal 2, which was light years ahead of Portal 1 in my opinion. Portal 1 always felt like a mod.

The game. How have I not made this abundantly clear over the past 20 years?!

You know what? I've avoided these because I feel like fan projects often don't reach the heights of professional made stuff (how could they?) but I've been wanting some more Portal for a while. I'll give it a shot.

I like to imagine this is how every nation is at all times, and we're just learning about it recently as everyone seems to give less of a shit about keeping up appearances.

Oh now I'm Todd Howard! I see how it is!

The real fruit was me being pissed off at the transition from 6 to Gaiden. (Spoilers for 6 and Gaiden) I actually posted that on the Yakuza reddit, and the only response was someone basically making a bunch of inferences of stuff that didn't actually happen in the game, nor was it stated or implied, which seems about right.

I'm actually partway through Judgment! But I stopped playing a while back as I wanted to catch up on the main games first. To be honest I prefer Judgement to the standard Yakuza games. I'm a huge sucker for detective stuff, even surface-level elements. I've decided to hold off on it and Lost Judgment, as well as Ishin, so that I have something to play in the gap between 8 and 9. Have not considered Fist.

??? I didn't build a ship even once, I bought it from a vendor!

Alright, since my last post here I've completed the entire series (sans Ishin and the zombie one) to date. My opinion is pretty much the same. It only differs in that realizing that the games were less "serious crime drama" (which is the impression 0 gives very strongly) and more "silly soap opera for teen boys" made the plots of each more enjoyable, as they get real stupid. In 0, they tended to really separate the stupid and the serious, which made it kind of feel like two different games. But once you get into the main series, you realize that they don't separate the stupid from the serious, they separate the stupid (the plot) from the silly (the side content). Since it's customary to do so once you play through a series, I guess I'll a brief list of where the games stand, these don't have spoilers, I just wanted to make the list smaller. Each one's just a brief opinion: Like A Dragon Kiwami 2 Gaiden Yakuza 5 Yakuza 0 Yakuza 4 Yakuza 3 Kiwami 1 I also really enjoyed the special trial for Infinite Wealth. Tried not to play many minigames as I like those to be a surprise, but the combat revamp seems interesting and like it adds additional depth, and the characters seem good. Still weird to have Yong Yea be Kiryu, and I was hoping Kiryu would play a smaller part, but whatever. I ain't playing with Japanese Ichiban. English Ichiban is fucking hilarious. He's got all the character that Kiryu lacks. Maybe that's why they chose Yong Yea for Kiryu. He's the monotone drone that man deserves. I just realized I forgot to add 6 to the list. It's probably be above 0, but I ain't fixing it now! It was a fun little game with an exceptionally stupid twist and the writers are clearly cowards.

When the hell did I put 100 hours into Starfield?? That's the most fucking offensive thing anyone's ever said to me!

Well shit, fuck him, I'm hanging outside the Dominos, then!

Nah, waiting in Bill Gates' dumpster for him to throw one away.

MiniLED is lame. MicroLED is where it's at.

Hey man, when the scruffy dude hanging out in front of 7-Eleven is eating his raw pigeon at 3AM, who am I to tell him it's gross?

There'll be an old man hanging around the homeless park, he'll teach you how to do the Tiger Drop and you'll be fine.

I just played through the entire Yakuza series. I'm at least 90% sure if you move to Kabukicho, you can just beat the shit out of all the muggers trying to fight you. Outside of that you can help folks with their wacky hijinks for big bucks.

The only thing I know about real artists is that none of them know how to draw hands!

You know, to this day I fail to understand how this is meaningfully different than a studio using references of shit they find on Google to make something "legally distinct." Same idea, "training" someone on art they don't own to make a commercial product. I've yet to hear a robust explanation on it being truly anything I should give a shit about.

Dude unironically walked around a bustling shopping district in a region 65,637 square miles large (about the size of Wisconsin) and thought he was proving something, lol.

The size difference between the two screens would drive me insane. The DS and 3DS already had different screen sizes and that bothered me, multiplying that difference by two would be especially jarring in games where the bottom screen was more important.

In the first several hours? No, I was just as enthralled as everyone else. But where most people played for dozens or hundreds of hours, it became apparent real quick what the game was and the more time I spent with it, the less I liked it. Think I maybe clocked in 30 or so hours before giving up. I think the real breaking point was when I realized any faction I joined, I'd eventually become the leader. On top of everything else, that just felt like weird fanfic nonsense.

Some More News, but I'm sure they've had a Suck My Nipple segment once or twice!

See, an inherent issue with the ol' two party system is that if you feel alienated from your party, your only other choice is a party you're probably a hundred times more alienated by. I think folks just gotta accept that you don't need to slot neatly into your party, because it's not actually part of your identity. It's a choice you make based on your identity, but if you're looking to "fit in" to a huge generic conglomerate of half a nation, that's getting lost in the woods. "The Left" isn't a close-knit group of best buddies, it's just a lot of folks who happen to, at least at this point in time, align far more with progressive values than whatever the fuck "The Right" has been up to lately. Your party alignment isn't a glove, it's a blanket. It doesn't have to fit perfectly, it just has to get the job done. Also;

See, my problem with Skyrim isn't just that I think the gameplay is shit, I think all the terrible acting, bottom-tier animations, dollar store terrain geometry, basic bitch quests, boring ass predictable dungeons, busted upgrade systems, uninteresting storyline, lame characters, boring art style and the nearly one-note theme (snow) of almost the entire game world all combine to make something incredibly uninteresting for me personally. That said, it has horses, so it's at least one step ahead of Starfield. On the other end of the spectrum (or maybe a couple doors down?) we have Dragon's Dogma, which has killer gameplay, but the world and characters are somehow several thousand tiers below Skyrim, so even a gameplay whore like me is like "no bro I'm good."

The world and the story are almost always shit, because video game narratives are still in their infancy; either copying movies, which never works in an interactive medium ten times longer than a movie, or being really disjointed and weird because the people writing the story aren't really storytellers, and even if they are, integrating a story into a game in a way that feels natural and not just emulating another medium is tremendously more difficult than simply telling it or showing it off. Hence, most games fail miserably at these elements. For example, just finished Yakuza: Like A Dragon last night. Fun game, pretty good story, but the juxtaposition between the highly emotionally charged final scenes and me using a suplex command on the final boss over and over with damage numbers popping out feel like two extremely different things just kind of squashed together, held together by the continuity of the characters and graphical assets rather than a solid narrative throughput connecting the two things. It being turn-based makes it a little sillier than the average Yakuza game, but only a little. The difference between what the average person thinks is a good video game story, and what I think is a good video game story, is that most people seem to be fine with movie-style cutscenes where you put the controller down and eat popcorn while cool shit happens. I think it's way cooler when the cool shit is happening because you're doing it yourself as part of the narrative. I think we're still at a stage where people see some Hollywood-level acting and some tight cinematography with some pretty explosions, folks will call that a good story as long as it doesn't shit the bed entirely. And that just does nothing for me. But if there's a really fun gameplay loop, yeah, that's enough for me. Likewise, I don't know what other people think of when they say something like "the world is shit," what part of the "world" are they referring to? For me, that would be both artistic design and level of interactivity. So something others hold in really high regard, like Red Dead Redemption 2, because it looks really realistic and has top class animations and is very "immersive," might be an excellent world. Where for me, the more shit I can interact with in freeform ways, and the more creative the world is and the more interesting it is to look at, the more I like the world. I find when I complain about low interactivity in most games, people tend to not even be able to conceptualize what I'm saying because we've seen the same few ways to interact with game worlds for 30+ years. Run, jump, hit or shoot things, maybe a minigame. Not nearly enough freeform stuff. Closest mainstream thing is being able to play with world objects in a very limited way in Bethesda games, and that simple concession qualifies it as a game proclaimed as "a world where you can do anything!" Also sidescrolling traditional Tales combat is boring ass dick cheese.