Spent all week in a post-9/11 fugue state consuming loaded media coverage and increasingly unhinged "takes" from all sides of the political spectrum. I really just need a break from staring into the abyss. Threw on Starship Troopers last night for something a little less deranged than reality, that helped. Gotta log off and chill out this weekend. I'm thinking about what games to play and simpyly smiling.
Despite the packed release calendar I'm in kind of a gaming lull at the moment, not really focused on anything. Jumping in & out of Wargroove 2 on Switch, that's been fun. It's a marked improvement over the first game and feels like genuine Advance Wars, couldn't ask for more. Only problem is I keep getting distracted so I'm playing at a snail's pace. I tend to do that with tactics games - play a few turns, put it down.
I also impulse-bought Aragami 2 on Switch. That was a mistake because the image quality and performance is terrible. I could have played this on game pass but instead I waited too long and wasted money on this version. It's a good enough stealth game so I'll probably put up with the shoddy port. The older I get, the more I just want to take out guards and hide their bodies in an open sandbox. That's gotta be my favorite game genre at the moment and I feel like I'm running out of pure stealth games to play - they are few and far between!
On the PC front, Robocop: Rogue City rules and I think I'm looking forward to that more than anything else currently. Based on the demo and how Teyon hit the sweetspot with Terminator Resistance, it is sure to be a Double-A Delight. The satirical tone is front and center, plus that little city block hub is a joy to lumber around in...menacingly. It's just filled with hobos and hooligans and you feel the hopelessness of this hollowed out post-industrial hell. Every other building is Liquor, Payday Loans, Pawn Shop. I rolled up on three bums trading stock tips around a burning trash can. Little details can make a game so much more immersive and I just love the idea of anchoring this admittedly shallow FPS to a small city hub. Hopefully it changes a lot over the course of the game as you return between missions, otherwise that is massive missed potential.
That's the way to do open world as I see it: small, dense, lived-in. A slice of a world, not the whole pie. Reject the CP 2.0.7.7 philosophy of milewide inchdeep spectacle, these games being made at an unsustainable scale that end up littered with design compromises and technical issues. Or as people call them after a couple three more years of labored development on top of an already too long dev cycle, "Good Now." I'm not good with that. I did hear CD Projekt Red workers announced their intention to form a union in response to the huge wave of industry layoffs, that is very nice to see and I wish them all the best.
Want Alan Wake II on PC in a couple weeks but I refuse to buy anything on Epic, so that's a SKIP for now. It looks really promising and I hope to play it some day, it's supposedly veering further into survival horror so I'm excited to see how that pans out. I was pretty heavily disappointed with the first game back in the day. Such a simple linear shooter when I was foolishly expecting some kind of sandbox-y survival horror masterpiece. Remedy is hit or miss for me, they make good shooters but I never loved the level design in any of their games.
Oh and lastly I played some Forza after it dropped into game pass this week. It's uh, kinda boring. There are only so many corners a man can brake around before his eyelids start to feel heavy. I feel like the Forza Horizon games tend to strike the perfect balance between sim and arcade racing, you still have to brake around corners but the races and environments feel so much more dynamic and gamey. Idk, I'm clearly a casual racing enthusiast so my opinion on sim racing is worthless. None of it matters anyway because nothing will ever top the fucked up GTA IV physics where the cars are driving on ice with way too much suspension. RETVRN.
I could keep going but I guess I should stop. The only other game I jumped into recently was Vampire the Masquerade Bloodlines, I have some thoughts but I'll save those. Thanks for reading if anyone even gets this far. I'm not sure who I'm rambling to anymore but it beats yelling into a hole. I mostly wanted to say how impressed I am with the Robocop demo, it has been several days since I played it so it truly stuck with me. I still want to try the demo for a game called Peripeteia as well, haven't gotten around to it. Another bleak Polish game set in a cyberpunk dystopia. Anyway thanks for reading and, I cannot stress this enough, Peace.
