It's a shame that the racing etiquette stuff is treated with an eyeroll because as a motorsports fan that's where the interesting racing happens IRL. But you wouldn't necessarily get that from GT if that's all you have to go by. It feels like GT (and Forza for that matter) could do a better job incorporating that into the design somehow.
When it happens in real life, it's also professional drivers who know those rules and have enough driving skill to follow them consistently. I don't disagree that it's not the worst thing to try and implement into the game, but there are plenty of newer players who would probably be really frustrated with it, either because they don't understand the rules, or just aren't skilled enough at the game to avoid some of the things the game doesn't want you doing. It's been a long time, but I vaguely remember that being a big issue with GT Sport - you'd be racing and all of a sudden you'd get tagged with a penalty and have no idea why, or you'd get hit with a penalty for something it seemed like another player caused.
Finally.. is it me or does this game's tone comes across somewhat similar to Shenmue's sincerity & obliviousness?
No, it's not just you. I don't think Poly was trying to create a good racing game as much as they were trying to make absolute hagiography for car culture. Personally, as someone who got into cars and learned things like gear ratios from GT2, I'm absolutely here for it. I totally get why Jeff et. al. would make fun of the cafe they have in the game, but at the same time that's sort of exactly the tone a lot of enthusiast culture has. A lot of the "dialogue" feels like it came straight from a PR brochure the manufacturer would send out.
Those conversations between the talking heads reminds me of language classes way back in high school when you would be shown two people talking to one another and they'd have a super-stilted conversation because you were in a particular vocabulary unit and they needed to use specific words rather than talking like normal people.
I'm envious of Jess' character creating abilities. Even with the improved character generator, the best I can manage is making a long-lost hillbilly relative version of myself.
This might be an unpopular opinion but I think the design of Souls (Elden Ring included) games have leaned too far into the reputation of being hard. Everything after the original Dark Souls felt like they added more enemies to encounters and ramped up the damage they do.
I dunno, maybe my skills are just degrading over time but each new game I feel like I'm encountering more instances where I'm just frustrated rather than being satisfied by the challenge.
My take on Elden Ring so far (about 15 hours in), is that it has the widest disparity in difficulty of any Soulsborne game. Prior games were very authored experiences. You generally had two or three routes you could go down at any one time before you needed to beat a boss to progress. For example, you might have the "intended," the "expert player," and the "masochist" routes. However, no matter what you picked, you would eventually kind of scour those areas for items and materials. And because the items were designed to be roughly appropriate for that stage of the game, there was sort of a theoretical maximum power level you could hit before you needed to take on a boss.
In Elden Ring, you can go pretty much anywhere at any point from the jump. On the one hand, this means that it's much easier to completely break the early encounters by just zooming around to a high level area, picking up the upgrade materials, and warping back. On the other hand, there isn't anything to stop you from wandering straight into an end-game area and getting pasted.
I would ultimately argue that the defining feature of Soulsborne games isn't actually the difficulty, it's much more that it's a "no safety rails" series. There are plenty of other games with very difficult encounters, it's just that those games have things like Gear Score, or level ranges on the map, or even the "There is a boss beyond this point. Are you sure you want to continue?" message that sort of guideposts players. Souls basically has none of that. You want to ride to that far corner of the map? Fine. But you are responsible for the consequences.
This is like the first year I’ve actually had difficulty sitting through and watching these goty casts. It’s not giant bombs fault.. it’s the actual games themselves. 2021 was an incredibly weak year for games, my brain starts to switch off hearing in-depth discussions about games I thought were either bad or had no interest in even playing. 2021 was bad year for a lot of things :(
I think the discussions have been pretty good, but I agree about the games. I picked up Nobody Saves the World on Gamepass the other day and it's already better than 90% of the stuff I played last year.
Personally, I tend to get most strident about games where you can see a lot potential that goes unrealized. Which is sort of where I land with Deathloop. The first 6-8 hours of that game were legitimately awesome and I had a great time. But then you get to the back half of the game and the whole thing falls to pieces because the game has absolutely no solution for keeping the repetition fresh. Which is why the last 6-8 hours of the game were among the most disappointing things I've ever played.
Which is precisely why it's so frustrating. If I'm honest, I'd probably score the game somewhere in the range of a 6/10. In other words, very middle of the pack. But the reason I frequently talk about it as though it's a way lower score than that is because I can see the ways the game could have been an all-timer, and it's absolutely maddening that the devs made some of the choices they did.
C'mon. 15/22 is not an F. It's 68%. Alex deserves at least a D+! Especially in light of a certain professor having trouble with pluralization in Question 1.
I definitely had the feeling that FC6 would have been much, much better had it been shorter. They could easily have gotten by with just limiting the story to a single region rather than repeating the process 3 separate times. It could be a really good 25-30 hour game, but ends up being a thoroughly mediocre 60 hour one.
Old Call of Duty is better than new Call of Duty? COD4 is still a better game than MW19. This franchise went off the rails a long time before they got to Call of Duty 18.
Part of the problem is that "new" Call of Duty has been around a lot longer than "old" Call of Duty. There were 4 years between the first Call of Duty and the original Modern Warfare. There have been 14 years between Modern Warfare and Vanguard. That's crazy to think about. New COD is now a moody teenager. It's in freaking high school.
Which is a problem. Part of the reason why Modern Warfare was a success was because it was such a major change in formula from what had come before. Those original games were already getting stale after four years and three games. But if you look at the stretch of Modern Warfare to now, there hasn't been that same kind of shift to refresh the gameplay. Granted, I'm not the biggest COD person, but I'd argue that each game in the series has been basically the same gameplay wise as Modern Warfare.
@killroycantkill: re: the site doing pop culture and not specifically just gaming, I’d like to remind people that Film & 40s existed, Powerbombcast existed, Danswers existed, Alt-F1 existed, All Systems Goku existed, etc. They weren’t always every week, but at various times they were pretty active...... so I really think something else is the thing that’s making them angry/dissatisfied.
If you don’t enjoy the humour, fine that’s your stance, if you don’t like hearing opinions from anyone outside the permanent site staff, fine that’s your stance. But people acting like Giant Bomb ONLY puts out video game content is absurd.
I cannot speak for everyone, but its the content not driven by the personalities of this personality-driven website that kinda drive me away. I love Film and 40s. The Powerbombcast is what got me to subscribe.
I'm sure this and Albummer are great but they feel like shows I could find on Youtube.
Second this. The personalities are the main thing, particularly the interaction between the personalities. I don't like Dragon Ball all that much, but I'll listen to All Systems Goku because I like the people involved and I liked the people involved because they interacted with each other in things that I was into outside of All Systems Goku.
Recently though, each show feels like its own weird walled garden. Like, I'm sure the Albummer folks are nice people, but I don't know them from Adam. Since I have absolutely zero interest in the topic they cover and they don't really interact with the rest of the site, I will probably never get to know them because Albummer is all they do. And whatever this is doesn't even really have a personality attached to it at all - it's just some unnamed person playing a made up person.
There's just no cohesion between any of the new stuff at all. If this is the direction GB wants to head in, I honestly think they'd be better off splitting things in two. Keep GB centered around the main staff and spin off a subsidiary website for the rest of it.
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