Think I might play Virginia, that sounds like a quick and easy trifle of a game that’s hopefully also good! Also, I started a Klingon character in Star Trek Online so maybe a little more of that. Not quite ready to pick up my New Year’s resolution of completing The Witcher 3 yet though. Got to work my way up to that bad boy.
I’m quite hooked on X Rebirth VR at the moment so I’m spending more time with the headset on this weekend. The simplification compared to the previous games really suits the VR environment yet it’s still a complex, massive space game. It’s really great and works wonderfully with Oculus Touch.
And yes, I’ll also be playing Xenoblade Chronicles 2 as well. ;)
How does the experience compare to Elite Dangerous? Less pretty, more to do?
Yes on both accounts. :) This feels like a space game, whereas Elite is a space sim.
It looks comparatively dated (the character models are atrocious), and the actual flight model doesn’t feel as ‘real’ (it’s a lot more strafey), but it’s pretty epic in scale. Heaps of content.
Stations are huge city-like expanses (bascially modular, with functioning economies), awesome to fly around. Even though they cut back detail like civilian traffic to make it run on more hardware, there’s still enough going on to make it feel more alive than Elite. It’s cool when stations open fire on raider incursions for example.
There’s more to do, because you can build an empire rather than just fly a ship (but you can only fly one ship). So you can acquire other ships and set them up on trading runs, build your own stations, etc. Not that I’m that far! Got a couple subordinate ships now (container ship and a freighter) but need to explore more to open up trading opportunities to use them with.
There’s a little learning curve with the controls. I changed mine to use gesture-based flight rotation and the right stick for different targeting functions, but once you get the hang of it it really clicks and feels great. Great as a full-fat pick-up-and-play VR game - stick on the HMD, pick up the touch controllers and you’re off!
(note it still has pretty much the worst voice acting ever recorded) :)
I will continue with my Fallout 4 playthru. I have something like 55 hours in now and there is still a lot to do.
Pretty much every minute of gaming time since Christmas has gone to Breath of the Wild, and I don’t see that stopping any time soon.
I will be probably playing Batman Arkham Origins, because a @lordkosc’s snap reminded me of its existence and that I didn’t finish it.
No Nex Machina, as my puny computer can’t run it online :(
Of all things, I’ve been playing Hacknet for the last couple of hours. It’s pretty cool.
You should. It’s a lot of fun, and I’m terrible at it. I always come in last but it’s such a glorious way to fail.
I’m currently in 8th place on the Solar Settlers weekly challenge. You nerds got one more day to knock me off the high score list.
I’m also looking to finish Shadow Warrior 2. I like the shooting and stabbing even more than Doom, but it has surprisingly little personality. Some of the levels have Asian furniture and buildings. Every hour or so Lo Wang makes a dick joke. But it’s all so half-assed that I wonder why they even bothered.
Replaying UnderRail. I predict this will last a while because I want to try some new builds too and the game’s absolutely massive as is.
I thought I’d do a bit of XCOM2:WOTC on Thursday. It’s been solid WOTC ever since.
Hurrah I finished Pyre. Can’t remember the last time I spent 5 hours on a game in one day (excluding something like Football Manager).
So I kept my word for the weekend, played Virginia and Star Trek Online and not The Witcher 3. Not yet. So, anyway, Virginia. I actually played it through twice this weekend, partly because hey it’s short, why not. Partly because there’s an achievement for doing so. And partly, probably mostly, because I hoped it would help me understand what happened in the game. It did not.
Overall I liked Virginia, but I can’t say I really understood what it was all about and what it was trying to tell me. If you’re not familiar with it, I’d say Virginia falls squarely in the “walking simulator” genre. There is no combat, no puzzles and just a few collectibles. No dialogue in this game, either. Ostensibly you’re an FBI agent investigating a missing child case but that’s just background - you’re actually a kind of double agent, an internal investigator looking into the partner you’re assigned for that missing child case. What exactly you’re investigator this partner for was never clear to me. She’s described in the case files as a kind of Fox Mulder type, going off on loopy conspiracy theories and making wild assumptions and investigations. Maybe the FBI is just embarrassed by her and wants to get rid of her. Anyway, the game definitely invokes The X Files in the locations - your partner’s office is squirreled away in the basement of headquarters like Mulder’s, and the assistant director’s office looks just like Skinner’s.
There’s also a bit of Twin Peaks here because I guess there has to be - a touch of the supernatural, symbolism with animals and sinister background conspiracies, or at least I think maybe a conspiracy. I can’t say I fully grasp anything that happened after playing twice. Partly because the lack of dialogue leaves you inferring what’s going on in several scenes, watching the simplistic blocky figures’ body language, and it doesn’t give you a lot to work with. Also, and I don’t think this is really spoiler material because I’m not sure this game can be spoiled, but you will hop perspectives and characters several times throughout the game, and it’s not always clear what character you are playing as at all times. Sometimes you’ll swap to a new character immediately after an action you’ve taken, and then see that character and their actions from an external perspective. But even finding out who you were and what you were doing doesn’t necessarily help you understand why that just happened.
Anyway, I can’t say I was disappointed, it was a worthy $4 experiment. I just can’t say that it was a categorical success, but an interesting experience. I think.
Virginia is what happens when a bunch of guys want to make a movie but have the budget and skills to make a game - i mean the game opens with them introducing themselves in introductory credits as “Directed By ____”. From that perspective its pretty cool. However its solidly in the David Lynch filmography style of the early 90s with a lot of X-Files inspiration.
I think the game works if you’re young and never experienced those 90s things for yourself - after all, people born in 1990 are now 28, and maybe David Lynch and X-Files are just shit their parents did and it’s all new to them.
I don’t know that it makes a ton of sense or really cares to do so; the theme of “break on through to the other side” seems to be the key to breaking out of the doldrums of a backstabbing office job that breaks your spirit and turns you into the man… or something like that. It’s just another one of these many, many media products out right now that looks back to the early 90s for inspiration. It’s absolutely a walking simulator though, because it aspires to be a movie. Still think it’s probably better than David Cage’s stuff.
That reminds me, I meant to mention the game’s use of jump cuts. One moment you’re walking through a doorway into a hall and then boom - you’re outside walking toward a car or something. I guess it cuts out some of the tedious walking in their walking sim, and it’s something you see all the time in movies and TV, but I don’t recall seeing it in a game before.
Like Lynch stuff, I enjoy not being able to make much sense of it, although, like with Lynch stuff again, I have my own interpretation about what happened, which seems to go contrary to what most people think is going on if I am to trust message boards, but I am a dark and tormented and very special soul. To me, in a sort of reverse answer to one of the person they cite as inspiration, it was a tale of regrets and missed opportunities.
I loved the camera angles and moves when you were looking around: magnificiently cinematic, in a way I rarely experienced since Shenmue 2.
Well, for the blog, I was gonna play this:
But I can’t get it to capture properly, so as a plan B, I might start what might be an extended series of:
Since I realize I’ve never done any recordings of any Wing Commander games, so of course, I’d need to start with the best.
I might also have some time to slip in:
On my Vita, hopefully overcoming the feelings overwhelmingness I got the last time I tried to play it. SO MANY THINGS TO KEEP TRACK OF.
I’m getting back into Street Fighter 5. Yay!