Re: What Have You Been Playing... IN OCTOBER 2024?

On 11/2/2024 8:45 AM, Spalls Hurgenson wrote:

On Fri, 1 Nov 2024 21:50:09 -0700, Justisaur <justisaur@gmail.com>
wrote:

On 11/1/2024 8:27 AM, Spalls Hurgenson wrote:

 

* Star Wars: Dark Forces Remaster

 

This sounds horrible too, but in a way that desecrates the revered
corpse of an awesome game that I came too late to.

 In fairness, the actual gameplay is fine. It's the 1995 game with
higher resolutions. Personally, I thought the soft-synth MIDI sounded
worse, but that's subjective; it wasn't _bad_, just not as good as it
could be. The low-friction of the KEX engine port was problematic, but
the platforming in the original was pretty shitty already. The only
truly awful bit of the remake were the cutscenes, and -being a
1995-era video game- those were a pretty short part of the game.
 No, my biggest objection is that they're charging $30USD for a game
that's only _slightly_ better than the $5 game already on sale. Just
get the original, maybe apply a fan-made patch if you _really_ need
full mouse-look and higher resolutions, and you've got as good
(arguably, a better) experience than what Nightdive Studios is
charging you for.
 

What Have You Been Playing... IN OCTOBER 2024?

>
***** Mass Effect: Andromeda.
It feels almost perfect to me, closer to what I loved about the first
one, but modernized with cool exploration, tons of character
interaction, choices seem like they may matter and satisfying combat.
Sure I'd like some space combat, but that's it.  As mentioned I find it
superior to Starfield in almost every way.

  "Andromeda" was okay, but only because the combat was as good as it
was. Almost everything else about the game --the exploration, the
characters, the story (you know, the stuff that made the early Mass
Effect games so memorable)-- was average at best, sub-par at worst. If
you wanted an action/explorer game, it was fine... but I think a lot
of people went into Andromeda hoping for another solid action/RPG and
it failed there pretty miserably. It was also a game that got
unnecessarily lost in the idea of "huge open worlds!" I could have
done with a lot smaller worlds to explore that would have better
maintained the pacing of the narrative and ditched the pointless
back-n-forth.
 

All valid points.  I am finding all the planet scanning on the 2nd time round boring (but that's been far worse in the series, and I don't really have to do it.) I'm trying to choose different dialog options, but when I actually do it doesn't seem to make any difference, it's just saying something different.  They got me good with the illusion the first time around.  With that I'm probably not going to complete NG+.
I thought I might enjoy some multiplayer, but it appears I got lucky even getting 1 other person the first couple times.  I spent probably a total of an hour off and on checking for others today.  It's definitely not possible to beat bronze (lowest difficulty) solo at low level.  I managed to kill a couple enemies then die, I do get xp, but it's not enough, and it's too disheartening to keep doing that, especially having to load out and load back in each time.
Maybe the story is bad, but I enjoyed it.  The worlds weren't that big, and they were beautiful.  I strongly agree on the back and forth for missions that unlock, the first time around it was fine and I did as much as I could on a planet before moving on to the next.
As much as the combat is fairly good, I still find the limit of 3 'active' powers a bit too constraining, though I did switch over to sentinel and at high level I can chain them all together with only a couple seconds between chains.
*shrug* I enjoyed it to the end one time, and was able to overlook it's flaws, I just loved it, which is a rarity.
--
-Justisaur
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