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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • I think they’re called that because they postdate the “looter shooter” that combined Diablo-esque “action RPGs” with FPS games, like Borderlands and Destiny. “Looter” without the “shooter” is a much better name for Diablo’s genre anyway, since we have far too many RPGs that are also action games and have nothing in common with Diablo.

    I’m still waiting for the resurgence of the style of shooter that came just after those that inspired this wave of boomer shooter; the likes of Half-Life, Halo, 007, TimeSplitters, and so on. I don’t know what subgenre will be assigned to those games when they start to come back around, but that style is also old at this point, so hopefully it doesn’t also get assigned the label of “boomer shooter”, because then it’ll be harder for both audiences to find what they’re looking for.


  • I’m back into Final Fantasy VII, which I’ve never finished before. I’ve been playing this game off and on over the past several years, and boy is that a rough way to play it. It’s very difficult to remember what I was supposed to be doing next, because that game often gives you one line of dialogue about where to go and then has no in-game reminder of it. As a result, I’ve got a walkthrough handy to reference whenever I’m lost. I just got to the bottom of the mountain after the snowboarding sequence, and those parts of the game where you’re trying to navigate the pre-rendered backgrounds are where you can feel its age the most. I’m hoping to finish this one up in the next month or so, ahead of the possible Rebirth PC port that we might be lucky enough to get this year.

    I’m replaying Horizon: Zero Dawn on PC ahead of the Forbidden West release as a refresher on the story, though I’m not going to play the sequel on day 1. They made me wait several years for it already. They can keep waiting for my money until it gets a sale down to about $40, maybe this summer. I still really enjoy the combat in that game, especially on higher difficulties, but this is a game that still feels like I’d enjoy it more if I could select missions from a menu rather than going through the open world trappings. It may have made these games cheaper to develop at the same time. Oh well.

    I finished The Outer Worlds and its DLC. I highly recommend it. I feel like this game gets overlooked often enough. Did you wish Starfield was better? Play The Outer Worlds. Did you want another Fallout: New Vegas? Play The Outer Worlds.

    Now that I’ve finished The Outer Worlds, another Obsidian game, I’m back to playing some Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire. I only progressed one quest a little bit this past week, but I want to keep pushing forward and finish this game before Avowed comes out.

    Other than the above, still more Skullgirls grind. My pushblock guard cancel skills have atrophied, and I need to run some drills. Also, Peacock zoning, even when I know the answers, is tough to deal with.


  • I beat the base game of The Outer Worlds and started the DLC. This game ought to have more eyes on it in the wake of Starfield. It’s just a better version of that game. Each settlement you come across might have about 10 NPCs in it, and each one of them is connected to the other ones via quests that help you form a picture of just what happened here before you landed. It’s excellent.

    I also finished Penny’s Big Breakaway. When you hit a flow state in this game, it’s so, so good, but a bit of jank in the physics and controls for the game hold it back. Like last week, my recommendation is still to wait a few months to play it, in hopes that patches can square away some of these issues.

    And then there’s my usual fighting game shenanigans in Street Fighter 6 and Skullgirls, trying to be the FGC equivalent of “swol”. The Capcom Cup finals for SF6 were a lot of fun to watch despite there being too many Lukes.







  • I don’t know how worth it is to try to explain my idea of what a hypothetical better version of Starfield is, but the short answer is:

    • only let you do one faction quest per playthrough
    • those factions’ quest lines already, in the real Starfield that exists today, intersect with one another
    • change how different factions react to you and those other factions based on a system similar to the type of reputation system Obsidian has done before, not unlike Levine’s “Narrative Legos” video, but it doesn’t even have to be that advanced

    It wouldn’t involve grinding. If I still haven’t articulated it well enough, don’t worry about it, because that game doesn’t exist anyway.


  • I’m going through some more of The Outer Worlds. Still really enjoying it. It’s got a good pace to it.

    Palworld is still my second screen game for podcasts and such. It needs some tweaking in the progression, but I’m at the point now where I can expand to additional bases.

    I picked up Penny’s Big Breakaway. It feels great to play. The boss fights are really interesting. This could and should have been one of the best platformers I’ve ever played, and maybe it still is, but some bugs and jank occasionally get in the way. If you’re swinging from your yo-yo and hit a wall, you’re supposed to do a small climbing animation, but it doesn’t always work. Sometimes when riding your yo-yo, you’ll kind of just skip and jump off with poor feedback for why. Sometimes you get stuck in a wall. The design for air dashing by pressing the button twice can often get eaten by other inputs, and that doesn’t feel great. The bugs and jank are not the most prevalent part of the experience, but they happen enough to bring down my opinion of the game a peg or two. I’d highly recommend this game, but maybe wait a few months for a couple of patches.

    My friends and I beat the main campaign of Quake II in co-op. It’s much faster in co-op and with the compass feature than they intended, but I wouldn’t have it any other way. Next we’ll move on to the expansions.

    Still labbing some stuff in Skullgirls for my Combo Breaker grind. It’s painful going through replays for my losses, but it’s necessary, and I took good notes.

    I had been dipping my toes into the waters of loot games with Titan Quest, and I think I’m at the point now where I can say I see the appeal with the genre and I’ll stick with it. For this game in particular, I do wish the bosses were more involved, because they don’t really hit a crescendo that a boss fight should have. Due to what defensive options the game gives you and doesn’t give you, they often just end up being running away from the guy in a circle until you can land some hits. Still, it’s fun. After this game, I might check out the sequel, Grim Dawn, or V Rising.




  • On the other hand, an alternate perspective is:

    • The average action game today has more going on in its story department than point and clicks did 30 years ago, and that’s not even accounting for games with a much larger emphasis on story like an RPG.
    • Baldur’s Gate 3 and the last two Legend of Zelda games are great examples of actually thinking outside the box, not thinking of explicit answers that were hard coded into old adventure games as valid answers. Those types of games back then got a reputation for “moon logic” for a reason, and I’m not sure we’re better off with games that give you a soft fail state for missing an essential item in an early area like old Sierra games.
    • What you might call “handholdy”, others might call “better UX” in a lot of cases, though there are certainly plenty of games that are a reaction to more guided designs; not just the above examples of Zelda and Baldur’s Gate but also the likes of Elden Ring, Factorio, Dwarf Fortress, and Outer Wilds.
    • People’s attention spans didn’t necessarily drop, and it’s even harder to show that people are largely less educated than they used to be, but even if both of those things were true, neither would be demonstrated by the types of video games that came out over the past 40 years. People have built entire functioning computers inside of Minecraft, and Red Dead Redemption II certainly, without question, is doing more with its story than any adventure game from the 90s or earlier.