So far Yakuza is so much fun on the ps2. I love the heat actions, like throwing a whole guy into a koi pond.

Hello everyone. Hope everyone had a good week. I was out of town for most of it for Thanksgiving so I didn't game much beyond some Balatro on my phone. Hope everyone has a great week!

Was in a comment section about designing games to respect the player's time in games and mentioned I never finished Hollow Knight because it makes you fight the final boss again each time you want to give the secret boss another shot.

Someone jumped in literally telling me "GET GOOD" and when I told them there were other things I'd rather be doing, they followed up with "so don't get hard games just to complain about." They never responded when I asked them how I was supposed to know exactly how hard everything in the game would be before I ever played it.

Every fucking time. I swear I can set my watch by it. The Dark Souls series has earned my undying enmity for what it has done to gaming discourse.

You ever play a game and it's all competently made and such but somehow it just feels 20% off for what it's supposed to be? And then you play something else of similar genre and it just feels SO much better to play.

What's the esoteric part about gamefeel? Why's 2013 Tomb Raiders and it's sequels feel like 20% off? Why is Black Ops - rated on Gameplay - so much better than Singularity which came out the same year despite both being made by Raven?

My population was reduced by 75%, which I think was benefited by having hospitals in as many locations with over 120k population (the Yucatan is very dense) as possible. Which was like, seven. I could have maybe done more but you really need your cabinet developing the high pop provinces because they also need 20 development for a hospital

even then, hospitals in 90% of my high density locations only seemed to change it from 80-90% population loss to 75%. My first run I had like 5.3 million population, ended at 1.03 million, and in this run I had 1 million fewer to begin with and ended at 1.03ish as well

Perfidious Castile declared war, got spanked, refused to land even after The Great Deadening, so I white peaced and have focused on consolidating the Aztecs. The largest Aztec player, Tepanecapan, is my junior in a personal union. Pretty much everything that existed prior to colonization from the Yucatan to central mesoamerica is owned by a vassal (except for a tributary who I can't make into a vassal because they made that really hard for some reason)

so even severely weakened the high unity might be why Castile hasn't tried to fuck with me again despite having 110k levies to my Whole Situation's potential 29k

anyway GOT SOME TIN CAN'T WAIT TO BUILD A REAL BOAT!!

Played this recently after hearing good things. It broadly has the "build cozy community in late-stage capitalism" vibe. The early game (first 3 hours?) is excellent and pairs very well with the game mechanics. There is a real feeling of living on the edge even though the risk of failure is allegedly faked (the game isn't a roguelike). However, after that you become powerful enough that the survival mechanics are rendered irrelevant; you have enough money to buy as much food as you want, and can easily forage or buy scrap material to repair yourself. Thus the latter two thirds relies heavily on its story, which is really a bit one-note. The fundamental fantasy is that you can solve everybody's problems, making you this bizarre superhuman space-station-spanning force. This works against the overall plot that is about being a marginalized outsider building community to carve out a place for a small life in the cosmos, because you can singlehandedly remake the reality of the entire space station. Interesting conflicts within this new community you have made are not really ever explored, and it's entirely stuck in the wholesome solarpunk commune vs. giant menacing intergalactic corporations rut. Even the late-game refugee plot (ripped from today's headlines!) does not fully explore the interesting angle of how a humanistic system can handle refugees when life support systems could be authentically taxed by their arrival. I think here of The Dispossessed, where (spoilers to follow) a planet-wide famine is addressed in a messy but basically equitable way.

I've heard the sequel is a lot more difficult so perhaps it is worth checking out.-

This game is wild.

“As we say, nobody understands what’s really happening, but it’s a weird feeling, you know, when you put your heart out into the world and the world embraces it and gives you so much love back,” he continued. “We get so much love from the players, all the messages and the fan art and the covers. It’s so touching and incredible; it’s very hard to explain, but we are shellshocked. Yeah, I can, we can say that, for sure.”

Broche’s comments were echoed by actor Ben Starr, who plays Verso in the turn-based RPG, with the actor explaining that it was always pitched as a “small game” instead of the critical collosus it has since become.

“It was never intended to be as big as it is,” the actor said. “Its turned into this kind of cultural moment, phenomenon, but that’s just because the game is very honest, I think, and a lot of people have bought into that. And thank you to everyone.”