superjoe

Twelve Minutes

Guardians of the Galaxy

okay

Spent the wee hours of Labor Day playing this laborious game. The act of playing it, what with the constant micro adjustments to the character's actions, felt like troubleshooting a PC that keeps crashing for no reason. I was either struggling or laughing at its hyper-specific logic and mechanics ("Don't mind me, Daisy Ridley...I'm just gonna hide in the closet to pass the time while you cry on the sofa."). It is the shortest game I played that could not end any sooner. At one point I saw a satisfying conclusion on the horizon, but suddenly the game swerved down a Pornhub subcategory and just kept going till I stumbled upon the credits. I did get a chuckle imagining what Professor X, Rey Skywalker, and Green Goblin were thinking as they discovered this dubious plot twist.

I don't know how popular this arcade game was pre-internet, but I have a fondness for the 1990 Aliens arcade game by Konami that I played every Sunday after church. I particularly enjoyed how the aliens burned when using the flamethrower and how it featured set pieces from the movie. It was one of the first roms I downloaded when I discovered MAME because it was never ported. In hindsight, the game is pretty basic as it's pretty much the last level of any Contra game, plus it was overshadowed by the Alien vs Predator game that had better gameplay.

Comparing my custom Shepard from the 2008 PC version to the Legendary Edition. I miss the dramatic, high-contrast lighting the most. HDR helps but it's still not the same. The Shadow Of The Colossus PS4 remake was somewhat similar in its art direction where the added detail sacrificed the dreamlike, blown-out bloom of the PS2 original.

That being said, the Legendary Edition has far less graphical glitches like texture loading, shadow flickering, and clipping.

• Metroid: Another M: Aftermath - would be a fine series if they just got rid of the dialogue, cutscenes, story, motion controls, first-person sections, etc. Followed by Metroid: Intergalactic Liberation Force. Then the prequel, Year One - Metroid: All Metroids Attack
• Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Shadow Wars 2 - not sure how this would hold up without 3D, which made the UI fun to look at and made it easier to distinguish high ground

On a related note for PC users -- I've been playing a stealth-hacker build, and by far the most annoying issue I've had with the game's keyboard controls is unintentionally dodging after double-tapping a direction. This has resulted in accidentally blowing my cover bumping into a guard I was trying to stealth kill or dodging out of cover when I only wanted to get a better view around a corner.

Tired of reloading quicksaves, I was about to give up and resort to gamepad, but that would've made looting so much slower. So I turned to google out of frustration and found out I wasn't alone:

https://www.shacknews.com/cortex/article/379/cyberpunk-2077-how-to-disable-double-tap-to-dodge-on-the-pc

I regret not finding this sooner. The above example simply requires editing two xml files (make backups) and also shows how to make a dedicated dodge key, which I've further mapped to a mouse button.

This was my first bug from the Nomad intro.