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PaperclipPerfector
6hr ago
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Video Game Thread
I haven't had much time for playing games this week, but I put a couple more hours into Deus Ex.
In a dialogue in the Hell's Kitchen bar, you run into Jock the pilot, who 'flies your brother Paul to Hong Kong.' After being bribed with a cold(!) beer, Jock talks about how Area 51 was turned into a secret base for Echelon IV, the United States' massive AI + surveillance system, when 'the government promised to stop spying on people'.
That's an interesting notion vis-à-vis what's actually happened IRL. This game was developed in the late nineties and released in year 2000. Which means there were rumors about 'Echelon' and mass surveillance even before 9/11 made it more 'necessary' and palatable to even start building such a project. And the writer assumed that when such a program was discovered by the public, the government would be forced to shut it down, at least ostensibly.
IRL, after 2011's Snowden reveal, we've seen new, enormous data centers for complete electronic surveillance of every citizen (and non-citizen) being built to expand the program. And most other developed countries have followed suit in undermining their citizens privacy and liberty.
The real world's human species is more docile and sheep-like in their surrender to government overreach than what the Deus Ex dystopia writer envisioned.
Edit: typo.
Playing Deltarune at the moment (so far I've completed chapter 4, haven't gotten to playing 5 yet). I really wasn't going to play it; I'm time-poor and don't usually have the energy or motivation for skill-dexterity games like this one, but every friend of mine in existence wanted to see me play it and so here I am.
This game is much, much better and more enjoyable than Undertale, I have to say. Undertale was absolutely chock-full of these utterly frustrating JRPG pop-up battles where you could be subjected to an impromptu fight against an enemy at any moment, meaning you had no ability to plan any of your fights and made the simple act of walking around something you barely wanted to do lest you get ambushed by some disproportionately difficult enemy without enough health items. In contrast Deltarune foreshadows its fights adequately since its enemies can actually be seen wandering around in the overworld; they're visible from a mile away and this means encounters can either be avoided or planned for in advance, and it makes the act of walking around a lot less tense since the game won't just foist unwelcome encounters on you.
The battle system itself is a lot more well refined here as well. It still sticks to the same core gameplay routine of RPG turn-based battles mixed with bullet hell components, except this time you have three characters to do battle with now instead of just one, which allows for a far greater degree of strategy and coordination in fights and really makes combat much more entertaining than in Undertale. For somebody like me who may as well be handicapped when it comes to reaction time, I find myself compensating on the strategy side very often, doling out health items and coordinating group attacks at opportune times, and this made it easier to get through fights then it otherwise would be if it were a pure bullet hell game. The increased strategy component in Deltarune means that there's a lot of flexibility in how you approach fights.
Difficulty is an aspect of game design that I've seen endless debate about and frankly there's no easy way to solve difficulty in games, but at least in my subjective opinion it's well-calibrated for the most part, though chapter 4 has a hard spike in difficulty that coincides with a sudden increase in the intensity and ominousness of the narrative. I think it generally works, though I was banging my head against the wall in frustration for a while at the final boss of chapter 4 (which is very difficult) but the boss of the chapter is a colossus that has been foreshadowed for a good portion of the game and is tremendously built up to, so the difficulty doesn't feel unearned. It really feels like an accomplishment to beat it, and almost comes off like something you really should not have been able to do.
There's also a lot more playing with format here than there was in Undertale. Deltarune really experiments with some fights, with battle mechanics calling back to many other games, and sometimes this works and sometimes it doesn't. As an example of where this really works, there is a bossfight in Chapter 2 which involves you fighting a shounen mecha version of a character with Punch-Out! gameplay, and it's legitimately a great moment. Chapter 3 has a bossfight involving a mechanic where you play minigames for points, which culminates in a Special Attack towards the end where they get thrown at you in rapid-fire succession WarioWare-style. Most of the time these gambits pay off really well, and helps innovate on the general gameplay loop such that it always feels fresh.
It's sometimes the case however that these diversions into alternative gameplay can feel underdeveloped, and also some of these gambles work less well than others. Chapter 4 features a miniboss named Jackenstein whose attacks involves you collecting points in a Pac-Man-esque setting peppered full of bullets that deal damage, and the attack doesn't end until you collect a key located on the far side of the battle box and make an exit; frankly it's quite a frustrating boss to play through. The base battle system in Deltarune feels quick and keeps you on your toes, this boss on the other hand forces you to go slowly because there is no timer, no predetermined end for an attack and every time you bump into a bullet you lose a shit-ton of health, so you're incentivised to slowly wait for the correct openings where the bullets part in order to progress without losing health. When you die on this boss, you have to go through the entire laborious process all over again. I found myself getting impatient with this, just a insanely bad concept for a boss battle in my opinion. In general though, the gameplay is an all-around improvement on Undertale, and it's very fun to play.
It also looks much better than Undertale, in general. Though I have to say the chapter-based release schedule of Deltarune does mean there's this persistent inconsistency in the production value between chapters, which makes the game feel far more uneven than it would be had it released in one go. There's a clear upward trend in polish as the game goes on, with Chapter 1 having by far the jankiest presentation, least expressiveness in the character animations and most rudimentary environments, which then steadily improves from then on. You can also clearly see ideas, character illustrations and concepts in the earlier chapters that disappeared or were replaced later on, which again adds to the feeling of a lack of cohesion. It's unavoidable with this kind of release really, but can feel jarring at points. Still, looks great and the soundtrack is a certified hood classic.
Plot- and atmosphere-wise it's noticeable just how much more ominous Deltarune is compared to its predecessor. This time the game is centred around a prophecy that looms large over the whole narrative, which comes true throughout the course of the game. There's a lot of quirky funny stuff that's typical of this type of fiction (which is often laid on too thick) but as Chapter 4 develops you begin to learn that the prophecy includes far more than you initially believed, predicts far more than you initially believed, and the chapter hints at an infohazard of the highest order at the very core of the prophecy - one that concerns the main characters - but is evidently so horrifying that everybody who knows about it denies it, refuses to talk about it, and attempts to cover it up as if it doesn't exist. There's a strong theme of fatalism and lack of agency at the core of this game that is almost antithetical to what Undertale offered up, which is that Your Choices Matter; in this game that concept appears to be thrown into question pretty heavily. The heavy-handed, almost child-like moralising that Undertale deployed in its attempts to subversively critique the gameplay loop of RPGs is noticeably absent here. At the halfway point of the game, it really is trying its hardest to foster a sense of impending calamity on the horizon, and at the final part of Chapter 4 you meet a colossus of a being that has no consciousness, can't be reasoned with, and in spite of the fact that it's an infant still in the process of hatching, it is a fight your characters barely scrape through even with help.
Overall I really like it. I think in spite of the association Toby Fox's games have with an insufferable crowd who really just likes anything that looks and feels like "happy Tumblr neurodivergent shipping time" and fill the internet with unhinged gay and trans fanfictions of their favourite characters (which his games certainly cater to a lot) he's also genuinely interested in making good, well balanced games that are compelling.
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I have been turned off from single player recently. Several games rot in my backlog after having been launched once or twice.
For multiplayer, I'm enjoying co-op Slay the Spire 2 and... "enjoying" is probably the wrong word for Marvel Rivals.
For non-video games, I've hit the 10th session of storytelling Exalted 2.5e for my party of five. We're still on the initial scenario, and I've probably been horrible at pacing, but what the hell, we seem to all be having fun. My players have just slain a major antagonist (a BDSM-clad deathknight wielding a huge artifact scythe, and no, I didn't make her up, she was in the printed adventure) with minimal losses yet appropriate tension.
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Tried playing Rollerdrome, and while it is a lot of fun, it's more challenging than I expected, and I'm not really in the mood for a twitchy game with a time limit.
Instead, I fell off the wagon, and reinstalled XCOM 2 last night (didn't have a chance to play it though). God help me, I will beat it on Commander Ironman mode.
If you have the discipline to not savescum, I'd suggest running it in normal mode and just not reloading previous saves. People have had their IM runs bricked because the game bugs out at an inopportune time. If you absolutely must use the in-game IM feature, keep a backup save after each mission and only ever use it in the event said bug bricks your run. It may not hit you, but if it does and you're months deep, it hurts.
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