What are you playing?

[Teho]

I do play mainstream games, I just don't talk about them much. Why? Everyone has heard of them and know what they are anyway. Also mainstream games tend to be very formulaic, Ubisoft's catalog being the worst example. But if they're polished and do what they do well then they are still enjoyable games. I've played the Far Cry games except the very last one for example, and played Black Flag and Shadows of Mordor last year. Saw and tried Watch_Dogs at a friend's. They're all pretty much the same game in a different setting. I wouldn't want to play more than one of these at a time, and wait a while before starting another.

The Uncharted games is another good example. None of them do anything remotely new, but they do it so well. Great characters and a story you genuinely want to see the rest of, that goes a long way. The gameplay bits are done well enough to not be outright boring, and for me at least I'm also entertained by good design and impressive tech. The cruise ship segment in Uncharted 3 for example, while being nonsensical plot-wise and not fitting in at all it really is very well made. The ship sits on a procedurally generated ocean, and affects every little object on the ship which move around accordingly. All while running the game and having shootouts without dropping a frame. On top of that the level is designed in such a way it feels almost dynamic when the ship itself rolls and you start walking on walls and climbing furniture to get around. It is of course scripted but it is so very well done. I'm enjoying myself just watching things like this even if the gameplay is somewhat bland.

So I enjoy Strafe because it is a really cool and well-executed idea. And I also enjoy the fast-paced gameplay of old. These modern "realistic" shooters where you have to hide in cover and wait all the time till it's safe to continue... where's the fun in that? In Strafe I run at 100 km/h and jump higher than my own height while shooting things in the face. Not realistic, but oh so fun! And yeah, the 90's aesthetic does hit me right in the nostalgia bone. So sue me!

It's similar with Polybius (which I think is PS4 only, yes), it isn't the gameplay so much as the design of it all. And the soundtrack and how everything fits together with it and everything else while seemingly being a complete cacophony of shapes and colour. I'm mesmerised by the sheer genious of it all. Still. I only barely played Minter's previous game which was TxK for the Vita. It was yet another iteration on Tempest, and was as good as you can expect. But after the first go at it I never came back to it. Polybius is much better for me, more of a new idea while still being iterations and improvements of things he's done before.

Other indiegames will often show off some really original and novel gameplay ideas which are fun to try and I really enjoy looking at them. But at the same time I rarely play them for long because they are created by small teams and often haven't much more to show you once the novelty wears off, most being arbitrarily lengthened just by tweaking the difficulty higher and higher while still being just more of the same.

But yeah, you'll see me playing mainstream games too. I just don't often find anything worth talking about in them. I am playing Just Cause 3 these days, which just like Just Cause 2 is extremely fun in small doses. This is one I just have ready for playing every now and then when I just want to mess around a bit. While mainstream it is quite original, or was in the previous iteration. The way you navigate around using a hook and a parachute, and all the ways you can combine this with the physics of the game. Quite interesting, and well executed.

Did any of you try Shiness yet? I'd really like to know what you think. It's been getting mostly positive feedback but I personally didn't find it interesting in the end. I dropped it soon after the first of its three main parts. I just didn't find the story interesting at all and the gameplay mechanics just didn't last for me. The idea of having an RPG where the battles are fought as a 1v1 brawler is novel, but I found it to just be so-so in the end. In the battles one character fights while the others wait by the side. They can cast pre-configured buffs while waiting there, and you can tag characters in and out of the fight. There are combos and spells and status effects still and it is all pretty fast, but in the end you can win most fights by just mashing an attack button and occasionally parry. Which is too bad, I kickstarted this and know from the updates that the developers really worked hard on this. But a lot of the work went into building the world and the characters and creating an entire language from scratch for example. And when that didn't turn out so interesting, and the gameplay feels bland... well.

Edit: Almost forgot, that was some really interesting info about Steinar Lund Harrison. I didn't know much about him so looked up his work and recognise a lot of it. Some of it is quite famous, such as The Last Ninja coverart. That's pretty cool!