Nodima

I know this is a useless comment but I might be out. I played over 90 hours of Breath of the Wild and I know that's quite a lot, but I really don't remember much about it other than rolling balls around everywhere. I'm also very admittedly awful at finding the fun, so doubling down on creation and exploration rather than bringing the more intricate dungeon designs of Link to the Past or Ocarina of Time or Wind Waker makes me worry that I'd spend most of this game just doing some pretty regular shit while some Gamespot employee is working on his 7th 101 things you STILL don't know about Tears of the Kingdom video.

Frankly, I think football player models peaked in the PS2 era. My number one complaint with Madden in the PS3-era and beyond is that the players' knees look really alien and players also run in a way that reminds me of the '90s Charlie Sheen classic The Arrival. Players in this era looked way more real and natural.

Because with each passing year it becomes more reasonable to assume this clip is completely irrelevant:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5afLcEkbYkM

(The video is unlisted so I can't embed it, but I promise it's the most important Giant Bomb content ever produced. Which is why they refuse to host it.)

I came to read the comments after Jess bringing this up but perhaps bringing a bit more context to it because this is not a take exclusive to Jess by any means, let alone folks who aren't huge fans of the series. It was a refrain for months on the subreddit, usually accompanied by hundreds of comments per post, about how Aloy's "hand holding" diminished players' ability to discern solutions for themselves or even focus on the game at all. Her constant interjections seemed to greatly distract from immersion.

I've had to come to accept that this is just a thing that has no middle ground to it. I loved Aloy's interjections, for me it felt like she was aware of her surroundings, her goals, her obstacles and so on. Maybe I just decided that I was hearing her internal monologue rather than Aloy actually talking out loud? In either case, maybe it limited the amount of time I spent playing the game figuring solutions out for myself, but the post-Breath of the Wild conversation that comes up later in this video has helped me realize I just don't care about that. I kind of want games to point me in the right direction as soon as possible, the better for me to see what it's got to offer in a timely manner and get to the good stuff (which for me is set pieces, narrative, new weapons/mechanics...not so much getting better and better at using what I've already got).

Which is probably why I love the direction Naughty Dog/Rockstar games have taken, as well as the Sony first party games...I feel like I'm being asked to inhabit specific characters who know their worlds better than I do. They aren't a disembodied camera or a set of control inputs, at least not in total. But I also realized while playing Horizon and Elden Ring that I wasn't playing them remarkably differently. I get why someone might play Horizon like a checklist and Elden Ring like a mystery box, but I found myself constantly wandering from one interesting location to another, repeating familiar tasks in both games. One game just happened to have a compass at the top reminding me where those interesting things were and the other didn't.

As I've been replaying both games during the summer drought, I'm more convinced that Elden Ring is a more interesting and fun world to explore than Horizon's than I was back in the winter, but I'm still not at all satisfied by the conclusion that the UI or lack thereof has anything to do with that. It's more that Elden Ring's world is much, much simpler and combat incredibly less technical, which lends this feeling of intentionality to its world that Horizon can sometimes feel far too busy and clever for its own self-satisfaction to match. Elden Ring is also quite a reactive game, or at least its difficulty fluctuates wildly from area to area depending on a player's build and their familiarity with the tasks at hand. Horizon, by contrast, asks the player to use everything in their arsenal all of the time, and that lack of specialization can be truly overwhelming, especially when you aren't in the thick of that first release window marathon session.

In other words, Forbidden West kind of DOOM Eternal'd itself; even though I still enjoyed the hell out of it, it's evident that Guerilla felt immense pressure to deliver perfect on top of perfect and as any accomplished chef or bartender knows it's often when you get too in the weeds of a great thing that it comes out merely good in the hands of your customers.

But back to the original point of this reply...I really don't think that those critiquing Aloy's chirpy nature are chipping away at the character themselves, particularly in this specific instance where Jess immediately deflects any sort of character trait reasoning because that wouldn't solve her problem with the "hand holding" at all. For whatever reason, possibly just playing too many damn video games, a lot of critics with a bigger platform latched into Breath of the Wild as this tour de force of player agency (which it is, to be fair) and collectively decided any game that didn't aspire to that same level of freedom was somehow selling itself and its players short.

Whereas I'd say...cool, you, your friend or your favorite Youtuber discovered that Link can sled down mountains on top of his shield or pair two of his magics together to concoct some wild physics bullshit. But me personally? Hit me a with a tooltip reminding me of certain stuff every hour or so, especially if I'm just mashing attack over and over like it's Ocarina of Time. Maybe even have Link wonder aloud what use his magnet ability could have as he approaches an encounter?

But what do I know? I'm just a baby gamer that wants to be babied and dreams of his old Game Genie at night.

I'll always concede that in conversation. I'm not the sort of dude that thinks my reaction to a game is the definitive, absolute summary of its pros and cons. The game was clearly designed to be about internalizing its ruleset, and the fairness of that ruleset has been made quite clear by players of all sorts of skill level as well as physical and/or mental hinderance. It's been three plus years - I get this thing I have with Sekiro is quite a me problem. Part of why I've bought less and less games as I've explored my 30s is I realize I really want to Always Be Progressing - and I'm not always so interested in actually, fully learning a game in order to make the boss die or the door open.

I just had a really visceral reaction to hearing Jan react to this portion of the game because of how similarly I felt while bopping off the fodder enemies in this flashback sequence. But I equally remember just how hard I wound up crashing with this game, and perhaps I should have found a way to say: I hope I see Jan not have that same experience so I might be inspired to give the game a fourth try. Unfortunately, because this session was one of the most intuitively relatable streams I've seen in over a decade of Giant Bomb, I'm gonna have to see it to believe it.

Prayer hands are emphatically up in the chat for Ochoakiro.

This is going to be very interesting to watch evolve because Jan is reacting to this segment of the game exactly as I did. Within an hour or so I was pretty certain this was going to be one of the best games I'd ever played. Stealthing around this little villages and taking down the mini-bosses is so goddamn fun and visceral.

...And then you realize that this is all just fodder, none of it really matters at all compared to defeating bosses, and suddenly all these fun little encampments become little more than obstacle courses you're supposed to speed run over, around and through on your way to the boss of your choice.

I really wish Sekiro had been way more of this game rather than the sort of game it quickly becomes where there's a boss around damn near every corner and the fodder enemies are essentially a total waste of time. Yes, this is a basic element of every From Soft game, but the combat is also so essentially rudimentary in a Bloodborne or Elden Ring that you can enjoy doing it for the grind without missing it when you need to focus on a boss for actual progression. But even then, if you just want to go clear a fortress or building because you enjoy the enemies or the layout or whatever, when you walk away from it you can also have more health, more strength, more MP, more something other than coins and a vague sense of accomplishment.

By removing the grind element from the game, Sekiro kneecaps the most fun aspect of itself (for me!) and it's such a bummer. I couldn't help but watch this entire video and think to myself, "it's such a shame Jan's completely wasting his time with all this." I enjoyed this village segment so much I would just grind it over and over clearing the enemies trying to build up a speedrun...I wouldn't be surprised if some celestial clock logged four or five hours of playtime for me just looping through this bit over and over. And sure, it was fun as fuck...but it had no impact on the rest of the game at all, and Sekiro doesn't really make that clear until you're actually in the city with bosses waiting in every cardinal direction.

Thanks to the new PS+ system, I've been able to fool around with Zodiac Age without dropping the $25 or $50 PSN is usually asking for it, and...despite my really fond memories of this game (mostly tied to listening to albums I loved while ignoring homework and grinding levels to watch the numbers go up in various desert climes) through the first two hours or so I totally understand why someone would feel this way. Removed from the excitement of just having dropped $50 on the latest Final Fantasy disc, driven it home, unpackaged it, popped the DVD out and listened to the PS2 boot noise before getting into a world full of political intrigue and vaguely Olde English script...

It does really feel like I just got dropped into the middle of a the first or second expansion of an MMORPG I haven't played in years. The opening hours are so...muddy? And yet I can tell that this game is absolutely huge and full of things to do, too, even if it's to little tangible benefit.

I'm still quite interested to see how this game unfolds - particularly the job system - but I'm already wondering if I have it in me to see the thing through. My main fondness for this game was just killing time grinding for things as if it were, well, an MMORPG (I'd gotten into the FFXI PS2 Beta Test prior to this game releasing, and I was in the mood for some more of that without the social aspect for sure) but I'm already remembering that the rest of this game was weirdly forgettable other than the art direction, settings and to some extent music (though again I listened to a lot of my own music back in my high school days).

Anyway...sure, it's weird to quote-respond to a four year old Quick Look comment, but here I've done it!

As always, I can't begrudge the precautions of those who've both lived on the coast(s) and done international travel in the past two years. Let alone piling months and months and months of working from home on top of that. Let alone those with pre existing conditions or otherwise necessarily cautious.

But it's always interesting from a hospitality perspective to see people practice proper mask usage until everyone around is a familiar face. People were doing this in 2020 so it's nothing new but there's something about seeing people who have made a conscious choice to be in public still being selectively cautious that fascinates me.

Again, no shade, it's just quite sociologically interesting. I love these vlogs from beginning to end overall, it must be so confounding to swim through PR people and fellow industry heads after years spent emoting into a laptop camera.

I'm gonna use this video of all things to mildly rant on a subject that feels more and more curious day after day: at about 22 minutes into this video, the crew stops to consider an Uber ride and slightly jokes about how when you order an Uber (these days? I missed if they specified) you often find a 5 minute connection build to a 15 or 20 minute connection by the time you actually get committed. It's funny to joke about, I suppose, but...

I live in a the middle of the middle of the Midwest. Uber and Lyft were a couple years later to us than this or any coast. Gas is typically around $2. It's, right now, typically $4.50. I've got a situation where I could take a bus to one job then walk 13 minutes, the same bus to another job and walk 30 minutes, and in the abstract I'm fine with that...but I think about the conversation here about how 5 or more minutes of walking has become an automatic thought of an Uber.

The ride I took yesterday, the driver mentioned casually that he'd spent $60 more on his gas tank that day than he was used to a month or two ago. It made me think even more about two phrases that are often in the back of my mind: millenial lifestyle subsidy and the many variations of Uber makes no money. Does anyone else ever think about what effect this year is going to have on this expectation of ride share? More specifically to my previous anecdote, I'm not so worried about getting to work as much as I am getting home: those busses I'd mentioned before don't run by the time I get off, turning the 13 minute walk into a nearly 2 hour walk, and the 30 minute walk into a slightly more manageable 1 hour walk...just at 3 or 4 in the morning...

Weird that a Giant Bomb video of three cuties walking around Los Angeles has me on this train of thought, but...what if ride share dies in 2022 or shortly thereafter? I feel like for many people it's a question of convenience or safety (ie. a nice way to get stupid on a night out and get home smartly) but for some, it's become a quite reliable source of transportation to and from work. What if it just...disappeared? Yikes!

And this is part of the curiosity, right? So much of the design is built around that - honestly - one of a kind sorta tank, sorta not control over Leon. Watching Abby play RE4 a couple years ago, the showdown early in the cathedral where Ashley is the most vulnerable and most first run players will have to take advantage of their entire arsenal is pretty damn reliant on how cumbersome the player movement is.

Even more abstract levels like the hill villages after first meeting the merchant, or of course the entirety of the mercenary island in the end, in many ways draw all of their tension from how rigidly Leon moves around the maps or clumsily he operates his weapons. Thinking of RE2, they found the original game's tension without replicating its clumsiness by emphasizing the tight spaces and asking the zombies' shambles to create the variables poor camera angles used to.

But that was, more than anything, a setting that by its very nature created a sense of being trapped in a terrible situation. RE4 rarely dealt with that specific feeling - though when it did, it did so pretty fantastically - with the transition to fairly bespoke areas that felt distinctly separate from each other.

Even thinking about all that might be thinking too hard, though - if you've ever watched someone who's played too much RE4, it's quickly obvious that it's signature set piece prior to the title card is more of a timed puzzle than an action problem. Thinking about it abstractly, you then realize how much the nature of Leon's movement lends itself to a first time player getting scatterbrained and panicked. So what does that scenario look like through a modern lens?

These are just a few of the things I'm really curious about!